


Enjoy the Silence

by neversaydie



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Artist Steve Rogers, Daydreaming, Domestic Violence, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Fantasizing, M/M, Manipulation, Recovery, Writer Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-05-16 02:18:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 47,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5809873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neversaydie/pseuds/neversaydie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silence used to be peaceful for Bucky. These days it makes him feel like he's waiting for something, like he's listening for the warning sounds of predators approaching. </p><p>Now silence means he's waiting for the other shoe to drop. </p><p>He lives in a beautiful apartment with his husband-to-be and tells himself that everything is just fine. He doesn't sleep, he's scared of putting a foot wrong in case Brock snaps again, and he's desperately lonely, but he has everything he ever wants and that should be enough. It's not like he can complain about being taken care of, even if parts of it aren't exactly his choice. </p><p>Running into his childhood friend (literally) just might change everything. 'Just fine' doesn't seem like enough once Steve walks back into his life. The problem is, Bucky's been stuck in his cage for so long that he's not sure he can leave it on his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. everything turns quite leisurely from disaster

_Words like violence break the silence  
Come crashing in, into my little world_

Silence used to be peaceful for Bucky. These days it makes him feel like he's waiting for something, like he's listening for the warning sounds of predators approaching.

Now silence means he's waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Mornings are usually quiet in their apartment. Bucky never sleeps well and he's normally up before his boyfriend, sitting curled up in the bay window while he drinks coffee, smokes a cigarette, and tries to wake up. He sleepily watches the traffic on the street below and makes up stories about people in the cars, about where they're going and what they're doing with their freedom. About how they can see anyone they want and change their mind on a dime if they choose.

He snaps out of his reverie when he hears Brock coming out of the bathroom, looking gorgeous and scruffy from sleep in the way that still makes Bucky's heart jump even after all their time together. The appearance of his boyfriend makes his stomach flip in a treacherous, less pleasant way too, hand tightening unconsciously around his coffee cup until his knuckles are as pale as porcelain, because the next few minutes will determine how the rest of the day pans out. If Brock wakes up in a bad mood then Bucky might as well kiss a calm day goodbye.

He chews his nails nervously and lights another cigarette as his boyfriend shuffles into the kitchen, ignoring Bucky in favour of finding caffeine and a painkiller for his hangover. There was a time when Bucky would follow him, wrap his arms around Brock's waist and hook his chin over his shoulder to breathe him in while he's still blood-warm from the bed. It still happens sometimes, but only once he's confirmed that Brock isn't mad at him for something he did in a dream. Or mad at the coffee for being too weak, or the kitchen for being too bright, or…

Bucky snaps out of his head again when Brock comes into the living room, greeting his grumpy-looking boyfriend with a sunny smile. His mind wanders more and more lately, drifting into fantasy at inopportune moments when he really should be paying attention. Anticipation is key, and he can't predict moods when he's got his head in the clouds. Drifting might make things easier in the long term, but in the short term it means he's less likely to notice when he needs to move before something moves him.

He doesn't flinch when he blinks and Brock is suddenly in front of him with all his lean muscle and tightly-coiled strength, Bucky knows better by now. He's pleasantly surprised when Brock leans down to kiss him softly, his whole body flooding with relief. Bucky almost feels shaky when Brock pulls back, now the anxious adrenaline that had been building up in his veins has nowhere to go because Brock is smiling at him.

"Mornin'." Brock's voice is always rough in the morning, sends that same tingle down Bucky's spine that it had when he first heard it. He cups Bucky's face gently and rubs a thumb over his stubbly cheekbone in a rare gesture of tenderness. "You sleep okay?"

"Bad dreams." Bucky nuzzles into his hand like a cat, sighing softly when Brock sinks down to sit on the window seat beside him and pull him into his arms. It's so warm there, with the morning sunshine on their backs and Brock's arms closed firmly around him to hold him through the dissolving anxiety, that Bucky almost wants to go back to sleep right this minute.

The heartbeat against his ear, the sound of Brock breathing and the quiet whisper of his fingers running over Bucky's arm, it's all so much calmer than the threatening silence had been. Bucky feels stupid for getting pent up and nervous in the first place. Brock presses kisses to his messy hair and drinks his coffee without seeming bothered that Bucky's practically purring into his shirt. At times like this, Bucky feels like a total idiot for thinking that anything could go wrong this morning at all.

Feeling stupid is familiar, lately. Once the anxious adrenaline rush of anticipation has worn off and there's nothing to do but deflate and realise he worked himself up into a panic for nothing, that is. He hasn't mentioned it to Brock, who already has enough on his plate dealing with the job he hates (he wasn't designed for an office, comes home every day thrumming with energy that doesn't get spent sitting behind a desk all day) without Bucky piling more crap on top for no good reason.

Bucky just needs to learn to enjoy the silence again without acting like it's the calm before the storm, that's the problem. And it's _his_ problem, not his fiancé's. 

"Hey." Brock sets his empty coffee cup on the wooden floor and drops a kiss to Bucky's temple like he's apologising for the movement when his boyfriend is so comfortable. "Wanna get in the shower with me?"

"Mm." Not particularly when he's still a little sore from last night (morning shower doesn't mean _shower_ ), but Bucky has somehow lost the habit of saying no to Brock lately. It smooths everything out to go along with things, makes life easier, and isn't that what everyone wants? A quiet life? "When've you gotta be in?"

"Not 'til nine." Brock kisses him on the lips this time, tender and molasses sweet in the way that never fails to make Bucky's knees weak like some kind of bullshit romantic heroine. He'd tried to write a romance novel once, luckily hadn't got very far before Brock crashed into his life and showed him what romance really was. "Got some time, y'know?"

"Yeah." It's an acknowledgement, not an agreement, but they mean the same thing when Brock is kissing him again and pulling him unresistingly down the hall to the bathroom.

It's not like Bucky's opposed to shower sex, not at all, he's just not exactly in the mood first thing in the morning. But he doesn't _not_ want to do it, which is good enough to go along with things to keep his boyfriend happy. Bucky works from home and Brock has his hated office job, after all, so the least he can do is cheer him up before he has to go do something that drives him crazy for the sake of paying their mortgage.

There's a certain shift that happens in Bucky's mind sometimes, especially when he's going along with things he's not crazy about doing. Brock guides him into the spotless bathroom (working from home has advantages, one being that Bucky keeps the very expensive bathroom fittings _immaculate_ ) with firm hands that strip off his shirt and sweatpants with all the care in the world. That's around the point where Bucky starts daydreaming. It's not a dramatic shift, it's just that sometimes his mind wanders a little sideways of how things really are.

He thinks about when they first bought the apartment, how they christened the bathtub with the cliché candlelight and champagne and the slow, lazy sex that drove them both half mad and kept them anchored to each other as inescapably as gravity. They didn't get out until the water was too cool for comfort and Brock had wrapped Bucky in one of their new fluffy towels and it had been better than any damn romance novel Bucky could have ever tried to write.

He slides back into the present, cheek pressed against the slick, cold tile of the shower wall as Brock pounds into him, and wonders if he should clean the grout before it starts to turn black. It'd be less pleasant to get his face shoved into it then. It's easier to drift and seek out the good when things are in good order, when there's beauty to be found.

It's a little harder to find the beauty in things these days, just like he can't enjoy the silence like he used to. But Bucky just has to try harder, that's all.

 

The pharmacy is always crowded on a Tuesday.

Maybe the elderly get their pensions on a Tuesday, maybe it's when insurance companies pay out for prescriptions, whatever, Bucky's never figured out why Tuesday mornings are such a field day at the drugs counter. He tries to avoid them if at all possible, doesn't like being in crowded places if he's got a visible injury, but sometimes needs must. He can't have Brock come home to him looking like he's been getting high all day.

"Hi." He smiles, his most charming 100-Watt grin behind his sunglasses when he reaches the counter after fifteen minutes of queueing. "I got some water in my eyes, uh, chlorine maybe. Swimming. I can't remember what kinda eye drops I got last time, can you help me out?"

"Can I take a look at your eyes?" The pharmacist is young and pretty, red hair swept up into a tidy bun as she smiles back politely. Bucky reluctantly lowers his sunglasses and looks up so she can see the irritated whites of his eyes. "Did you get any kind of soap or shampoo in them?"

"Uh…" Brock likes him to keep his eyes open and look at him when he blows him, whether or not they're in the shower at the time. This time Bucky had been good and kept his eyes open even when the water started to sting, because Brock had been enjoying himself and he'd figured it couldn't last forever when he had to get to work on time. Everything had gone so _well_ this morning that Bucky just hadn't wanted to rock the boat. "Maybe, I'm not sure."

"Okay, I think we have something to help you." She nods and he shoves his sunglasses back on gratefully. He thinks he's seen this pharmacist before, wonders if she ever puts the gauze and butterfly strips and painkillers he buys together and comes up with something suspicious. But it's not like he's buying anything that playing sports wouldn't explain.

What would he even say if someone asked? It's not like he could admit that he fucks up often enough to get in fistfights with his future husband. That he's so immature he still provokes the man he loves into fighting with him like they're children on the playground. And he could especially never tell someone that he, with his gym-perfect muscles and broad shoulders, gets so nervous his hands shake at the prospect of—

"These should help." The pharmacist hands him a paper bag with a couple of small eye-drop bottles in it, jerking Bucky out of his daze. "Cash or credit?"

He pays cash, always, because if Brock sees the pharmacy come up on the credit card statement multiple times in one month again he might get the wrong idea. He's accused Bucky of being hooked on painkillers before, right around the time when he'd started to space out more often and lose track of conversations in favour of the alternate reality playing out in his head, so Bucky tries to keep his card charges looking innocent now.

He's too busy thinking about Brock and the painkillers incident (would his life be easier if he got hooked on opiates? He's not sure anyone would actually notice, as long as he stuck to pills and didn't start shooting up. He's kind of spacy anyway, and it's not like he's spoken to his mom or his sister for six months or something. Plus he works from home so all he'd really have to do would be sober enough to make dinner and keep the place nice for when Brock came home) to pay much attention when he picks up his change and tries to navigate his way through the sea of elderly patrons to the door.

He's so distracted, not helped by the fact he's trying to jimmy his change into his too-tight jeans pocket and walk, that he manages to walk slap into a very solid, massive chest right before he gets to the door.

Coins scatter on the floor, dragging Bucky back into reality with a bump and a sudden ramping up of his heart rate. This is exactly why Brock's always telling him to pay more attention to what he's doing, this is exactly why he always fucks up and gets himself—

"Shit, sorry." The guy he ran into is kneeling down to pick up the dropped coins, and it takes Bucky a second to realise he's supposed to move and drops down to scrabble for the change too. "Wasn't looking where I was going."

"Nah, it's my bad. I was miles away." Bucky mumbles, taking the coins when the guy presses them into his hand and feeling like a clumsy idiot. He looks up to thank the guy and pauses, head tilting slightly sideways as the sunglasses slip down his nose.

The guy looks familiar, somehow. Not exactly like Bucky knows him, but like he's looking at a relative of someone he used to know. He definitely doesn't know anyone as tall or blond (or broad or _handsome_ ) as this guy, he's sure. That is, until the guy squints back at him and a smile twitches crookedly at his lips.

"Bucky?"

"Yeah." Bucky vaguely realises he's just staring dumbly, because nobody's actually called him _Bucky_ for years. Brock has always called him Jim or _James_ when he's pissed off. "Do I know you…?"

"Steve, we sat together in, uh, tenth grade English?" The guy stands up and offers Bucky his hand, which Bucky takes to help him up without hesitation because realising who this is has hit him like a breeze block. "It's been a while."

"Shit, _Steve_. Hi!" Bucky's throwing his arms around Steve's neck and hugging him before he realises what he's doing. He freezes when he realises he's probably being inappropriate (what the fuck would Brock say if he came around the corner to see his fiancé hugging some guy he's never met), but then Steve is hugging him back and his rabbit heart slows down again. "It's been like, ten years."

"Must be." Steve is seriously hugging him back tightly, ignoring the tutting of the old ladies trying to navigate their way out of the pharmacy around the two bulky men embracing near the door. "You said you were gonna email me, man."

"I know, I know. Shit happened, I'm an asshole." Bucky finally brings himself to break away from the embrace, stepping back to look at Steve from arm's length. The guy is about twice the size he was the last time Bucky saw him, and it's like seeing two people at once when he looks at his face, the past and the present superimposed over each other. "Jesus, you changed."

"You too. What happened to 'I won't cut my hair, fuck the administration'?" Steve looks so damn _healthy_. Bucky remembers the little asthmatic guy who used to sit next to him and let Bucky copy off his _To Kill A Mockingbird_ notes when he'd missed class five times in a row. He used to be able to see right over Steve's head if he looked to his right, now Bucky has to look up to meet his eyes. "You join the corporate machine and get an office job or what?"

"Nah, I work for a publisher now. Write blurbs, sales copy, that kinda thing. Means I can work from home." Bucky shifts his weight nervously and sticks a hand in his pocket, hoping the pharmacy bag in his hand doesn't look like some kind of embarrassing prescription. He still has his douchebag sunglasses on, he realises belatedly. But it's probably worse if Steve sees his irritated eyes in full.

"Still writing that book?" Steve's smile is just like it was, just the way it's been burned into Bucky's memory since he was a teenager and had to leave the first school he'd actually enjoyed since he started education, and Bucky tries really hard not to start daydreaming about what might have happened if he'd been able to stay there and be Steve's best friend like he had been for that one great year.

"Uh, nah. Maybe. Not really." He goes to tuck hair that's no longer there behind his ear self-consciously. Brock had hated his long hair, it wasn't like he told Bucky he should cut it but he hadn't been shy about complaining how it got in his face while they slept, and Bucky had got a short back and sides within the first six months of their relationship. Though the nervous habits still haven't died, apparently. "How about you, what're you up to except growing up amazing?"

Bucky could swear he sees Steve blush at that. His stomach drops when he realises he's been a complete fucking idiot and let his mouth run away from him again. It's one of his big problems and it drives his fiancé crazy. Hopefully it's not enough to scare Steve off within the first five minutes of their conversation, because it's so refreshing to talk to someone that's not Brock or exchanging a few words with a sales assistant.

Bucky had almost forgotten what that felt like.

"I'm a freelance illustrator. Just got done with a kids' book, actually." Steve pulls his wallet from the inside pocket of his leather jacket and hunts through it, handing Bucky a colourful business card with a seriously dorky grin. "Sorry, I just got these and I'm way too excited about them. I think I even gave my mailman one."

"Your Mom must be stoked you made a career out of it." Bucky looks at the card with a warm feeling in his chest, choosing to ignore the fact he probably shouldn't be this happy for someone he hasn't seen for at least a decade. He remembers going to Steve's apartment after school, how Sarah Rogers would hang up anything he'd drawn immediately and find art contests for her son to enter in between shifts at the hospital. She was like Bucky's second mom for a while there, and he missed her a lot after he left.

"Oh, uh. She passed a few years ago." Steve has a slightly pained expression on his face when Bucky looks up, like he's not still hurting but the scars niggle at him now and then. "Breast cancer. They didn't catch it until it was too late, so at least she didn't have to handle all the treatment."

"Oh, man. I'm so sorry." He's reaching out to touch Steve's arm before he consciously realises what he's doing, but he doesn't pull back when the touch seems to take some of the strain out of Steve's face. "She was an awesome lady."

"Thanks." His voice is a little rough, but Steve recovers quickly and smiles when Bucky finally takes his hand away from his arm. The same arm Bucky used to be able to wrap his finger and thumb around he probably couldn't fit both hands around now, and it's still a shock to look at Steve, let alone touch him. "Listen, I've gotta run to a consultation. But it'd be great to get coffee sometime, if you want?"

"Yeah, I'd love that." The answer is coming out without being filtered through the lens of what behaviour is likely to cause an argument with his boyfriend, and Bucky's pretty sure he's going to regret it later. Still, Brock has friends he hangs out with outside the relationship, he might think it's a good thing that Bucky's getting out on his own a little more.

Wishful thinking, maybe, but Bucky does a lot of that these days.

"Text me or something, my number's on the card. Email and shit too." Steve smiles brightly when Bucky agrees to coffee, which probably shouldn't make Bucky's chest settle the way it does. "I'll see you soon, Bucky. I'm so glad I ran into you. Literally."

"Me too. I'll text you." Bucky's pretty sure he's got a stupid smile on his face and he forces himself to school his expression as Steve takes off, giving him a dorky little wave over his shoulder as he jaywalks across the street. He nearly gets taken out by a very pissed off cyclist, but he makes it to the sidewalk safely and waggles his fingers at Bucky again before he disappears into the crowd of pedestrians.

Bucky stands outside the pharmacy for a long time before he manages to get the heartbeat thumping in his ears to calm down enough for him to hear the street again. He lights a cigarette with less than steady hands and tries not to rub his sore eyes and smokes down to the filter until he can put one foot in front of the other and head for home without tripping or stumbling or drawing more attention to himself.

He spoke to someone. He spoke to someone who wasn't his boyfriend or his boss for more than two sentences for the first time in…

When was the last time he talked to his mother? Christmas? That was over the phone. He'd gone for coffee with his sister before she went back to school one afternoon, that must have been back in August.

Six months. The first time he's spoken to someone other than Brock in six months and it turned out to be the guy he still thinks about on a regular basis when nobody's looking. Steve had been his first real crush, his first friend he hadn't shared with a group of others, and actually speaking to him in real life instead of playing out potential conversations in his head is… slightly unsettling. In a good way.

Bucky puts the number from the business card into his phone and sends Steve a text, just a hi to give him his number, and then hesitates over the name to save the contact under. Someone bumps into his back and almost sends him off the sidewalk, and it pulls Bucky out of his head enough to tell himself that he's being paranoid again. There's no reason to hesitate, it's not like Brock doesn't have friends, Bucky can have someone too.

He taps in Steve's name and shoves the phone in his pocket like it's offended him. _There's no reason to get anxious about nothing_ , he hears in Brock's most exasperated voice. Bucky needs to stop being stupid and pull himself together because there's nothing to worry about.

If he has someone to talk to then maybe the silence won't bother him so much. Brock can't possibly have a problem with that.  

 

"Who's Steve Rogers?"

The question (calm, quiet, measured in that way that suggests holding something back) sends a cascade of ice water down Bucky's spine, and makes him sit up a little straighter on the couch. The ash drops off the end of his cigarette and miraculously manages to land in the ashtray instead of on the very expensive leather upholstery that they'd had custom made on the understanding that it wouldn't get burn holes in it like their last one. That would be just what he needed today.

"Huh?" He twists to look over the back of the couch and get a better read on the situation. Brock is standing by the dining room table (black, elegant, rarely used because who the fuck eats at a six-seater decorative table when there's only two of them) where Bucky's editing stuff is still spread out from his afternoon's work.

Steve's business card is in his boyfriend's hand.

Bucky could have sworn he'd put the card in his wallet and not left it on the table, but that's a very small objection in his mind as his heartbeat picks up a gear and his stomach flips painfully. He should've just thrown the card away like he'd intended, torn it up so it couldn't be read even if it was accidentally seen in the trash, but Steve had been so proud of the damn thing and Bucky liked to see him smile in that way that made his eyes crinkle up at the corners just like they had when he was a foot smaller and –

"Steve Rogers." Brock breaks into his drifting thoughts and brings him back to the present with an unpleasant lurch of turbulence. He's watching Bucky closely, holding up the card so he can see it with a deliberately neutral expression. "You've got his card."

"Oh, yeah. He's some illustrator they put me in touch with." The lie comes out smoothly, fully-formed and casual before Bucky even has to pause to construct it. He's become a very, very good liar over the last few years. He shrugs and stubs out his cigarette like there's nothing in the world that interests him less than Steve Rogers. "I've gotta go over some proofs with him, the usual shit."

"I thought you usually did that stuff over email." Brock drops the card back on the table like he doesn't care either, and they're both doing a great job of pretending at each other. They both know perfectly well what question is not being asked here, what's not being suggested, but neither of them are about to say anything about it.

All Bucky's good intentions to tell his boyfriend the truth went out of the window as soon as he heard the tone in his voice, and not for purely selfish reasons no matter that he kind of feels like a douchebag for not being honest. For all his bravado and bluster, underneath it all Brock is pretty insecure and easily hurt, especially when it comes to their relationship. If he thinks Bucky is meeting up with a guy for fun (a hot guy, at that) then he'll just get paranoid about Bucky finding someone better than him. Bucky knows that nothing is going to happen between him and Steve, that he's just an old friend to get coffee with, but it's easier to lie about it and spare Brock's feelings than put him through the anxiety of the truth.

Bucky's life feels like one big exercise in damage limitation, sometimes.

"They want me to meet him in person. I just do what I'm told." Bucky lights another cigarette straight after he stubs out his last one, which he realises gives him away a second after it's too late to cancel the action. He only chain-smokes when he's nervous, something Brock had been the one to point out in the first place, and he shouldn't be nervous about this. Not if he's telling the truth.

The first time Brock had pointed out his nervous habit, it was in the early days of their relationship and Bucky had come over after having dinner with his family. They were openly critical of his relationship with Brock, because they didn't understand it no matter how much he tried to explain it to them, so Bucky had sought out comfort after the stress of the evening wore him down and he was finally able to leave. He'd smoked five cigarettes hanging out of the window of his boyfriend's rented apartment, cold night air stinging his ears and neck, exposed by his newly-short hair, until Brock had draped a blanket around his shoulders and wrapped his arms around him from behind until Bucky had finished being angry and crossed over into exhausted.

They'd decided to move in together the next morning, as the pale light of the early-hours snowfall slipped in through the windows and made everything feel slightly unreal. Bucky's family weren't going to come between them, not if they didn't get the opportunity to. They'd just create some distance there and let them come to their senses in their own time. That morning Bucky and Brock had the shared heat of their bodies against the chill in the rest of the room, hidden under the covers while they whispered to each other like children with secrets, and it felt like they had everything they could possibly ever need in that warm space between the blanket and bare skin. If it had to be them against the world, then so be it.

Bucky's seen his family a few times since, mostly at holiday events or reunions he can't get out of, and pointedly ignores anything they say about his relationship. His strategy seems to work, because they stopped being critical and recently they've stopped trying to say anything at all.

Brock is standing in front of him (not looming over him, that's just his fucked up perception) when Bucky comes out of his memories, back into his head and the present moment with a bump. His chest feels fluttery and sore, like he's run away from something chasing him, and he tries to hide the unsteadiness in his expression when he looks up at Brock and blinks, questioningly.

"What are you hiding?" It's phrased like a calm question, but Bucky knows it's the start of another interrogation. Brock can be just as paranoid as him, only for different reasons, and isn't seeing your own worst behaviour reflected in someone else supposed to be the worst thing? It feels like it right now, anyway, rubbing his skin raw like sandpaper.

"I'm not hiding anything." Bucky takes a drag of his cigarette and tries not to sound pissed off (bland is better than irritated, not caring is better than caring too much, anticipation and deflecting is better than confrontation). "Sorry, I kinda spaced out there."

"Thinking about Steve Rogers?" Brock plucks the cigarette from his fingers (Bucky doesn't flinch, because that would just make everything escalate in precisely the way he's trying to avoid) and stubs it out in the ashtray a lot harder than he needs to. "Is he hot?"

"How can you ask me that?" Bucky can't keep the irritation from creeping into his voice this time, and he can see how it makes Brock's expression twist into something nasty like a car crash he just can't look away from. "When have I ever made you think I'd care if another guy's hot? When have I even looked?"

"You flirted with a guy in front of me at my own birthday party."

This old argument _again_. Bucky gets up off the couch with an exasperated sigh, ducking sideways so he doesn't check Brock's shoulder on his way past him. Physical contact would only add fuel to the fire he's trying to avoid burning him right now, so he makes sure to give his boyfriend a wide berth as he stalks to the kitchen to get himself a drink, try and get some distance from the conversation.

"You did that _right_ in front of me." Brock clearly doesn't want to let the argument defuse, following Bucky into the kitchen and folding his arms as Bucky pours whiskey into a glass and swallows half of it in one gulp. He feels exposed with his back to his boyfriend but he refuses to turn around, he doesn't need to see Brock's squared shoulders to know he's nearing red. "How do I know what you're gonna do behind my back?"

"I wasn't flirting! I was just making conversation because I didn't know anybody!" He wouldn't get so angry (anger only makes things worse, neutrality is safe, showing feeling is the way to get himself in trouble) if he'd actually done something wrong. What really happened is that he didn't know a single person at Brock's birthday party and had been only too happy to talk to the first friendly face that came his way. "Stop throwing that in my face when I didn't even do anything wrong."

"Yeah, you never do anything wrong. I'm always the asshole and you _never_ do anything wrong." Brock's scowl deepens as Bucky finishes and refills his glass without turning back to look at him. He watches him out of the corner of his eye and forces himself to not tense up, because that only ever provokes a response when Brock is wound this tight.

Bucky's muscles are starting to lock and he knows his knuckles are going pale around his glass, and this train is going too fast and he wants to get off but he's scared it's going to hurt like hell when he hits the ground. It's going to hurt anyway.

"That's not what I said." He hates it when this happens, when they get into these fights that go in circles or nowhere at all. He's half scared and half angry, whether that's at Brock or himself he's never exactly sure. "I've never even looked at another guy, why do you always think I'm gonna cheat on you?"

"You didn't tell me you met this guy today." Brock gestures tightly back to the table and the card sitting on it, the one bright spot in all the dark of the room. He's far too controlled in his movements to be losing his temper, but he's got the thread of rage running cold under his voice that lets Bucky know he's treading on very thin ice. "I asked you what you did today and you never told me."

"It was work, I didn't think it was important." Bucky finally turns and looks Brock in the eye, unable to keep from casting his eyes down when he sees the simmering anger behind his boyfriend's gaze. He's already messed up badly by not backing down and apologising at the very start of the conversation, it's entirely his fault that things have even got far enough for Brock to be in that square stance he takes like he's about to brawl rather than argue with his fiancé. "You don't tell me about every random guy you talk to at work, why would I do that? It's not important."

"It _is_." There's just a single moment of snapping, that one flash of Brock losing his cool through a clenched jaw when Bucky steps over the invisible line he knows deep in his marrow not to cross. But when he's this riled up sometimes his fear turns into anger and he can't hold everything inside the little box where he shoves it all every day to make sure he behaves and keeps himself safe. "You know I worry about you when I'm not here to—"

"I don't need you to look after me! I'm a fucking adult!" Bucky never figures out if it's the fact he swings his arm to gesture too hard or if he really means to do it (set off the fuse, it's already coming and he can't stand the slow burn, anticipation is worse than just getting it over with), but the glass of whiskey (cut crystal, Sottish import, the expensive shit Brock likes to keep in the house because it makes him feel upper class) flies out of his hand and hits the wall with a sharp _smash_ that cuts right through them both.

Before Bucky can move or speak or even think about whether he should drop to his knees and apologise, Brock is surging towards him as unstoppably as a force of nature. He shoves Bucky into the wall with all his strength, knocking the air out of his lungs and making him gasp and cough as he finds himself pinned, the back of his head smarting and his boyfriend's fingers tight as steel around his wrists.

Bucky tries to push away once, tries to kick Brock in the shin like a weak child, but all it earns him is being pressed harder into the unforgiving brick of the wall (exposed brick, stylish, puts up the value of the apartment) as Brock stares him down with the piercing eyes that let him know that what he just did was a _very_ bad idea.

"What the _fuck_ are you doing?" His voice is deceptively calm again, so level now that Bucky has made the first move, the first slip that let the devil out. "You think you can throw a tantrum and get your way? You think I'm gonna let you hurt yourself because you can't handle a simple question?"

"I wasn't gonna…" Bucky tries to twist away but Brock is a statue, unmoving as marble that has always and will always be right between Bucky and the rest of the world. It should be comforting, because he's only protecting him. Brock is only trying to _protect_ him by crushing him until his ribs feel bruised.

A crazy part of Bucky drifts back into that dream world his soul lives in, wonders what would happen if Steve walked into the apartment right now and saw Brock holding him against the wall like this, pinning him down against his own hysterical temper. Would he think Bucky was agitated, overreacting? Would he pull Brock off him, clean his clock and let Bucky hide in his arms and nurse his bruises like a wounded animal? Would he care at all? Would he help hold him down?

"I'm sorry." The words spill out without Bucky planning them when he realises that Brock is trying to protect him from himself right now. He gets touchy about the birthday party thing, gets defensive about not having many people to talk to and overreacts to their arguments. Bucky shouldn't be scared of Brock when _he's_ the one who lost it, _he's_ the one who threw something at the wall like a frenzied daytime-TV housewife when he couldn't control his temper. His whole life is one long performance of extremely bad acting.

Of course his boyfriend is concerned, he's behaving like some kind of lunatic.

"You make me so fucking…" Brock trails off, letting his forehead clunk against the wall even as his fingers tighten around Bucky's wrists. He sounds frustrated, like he doesn't know what to do with Bucky being this _difficult_ about everything all the time. "You make me crazy. You fuck with my head. You know I can't handle the thought of losing you, and you still…"

"Brock, I wouldn't—"

"I can't lose you, baby. I can't live without you." His voice cracks, and the bruising grip on Bucky's wrists suddenly seems like he's trying to hold onto him, not like he's restraining him. Trying to _keep_ him, safe or just for himself. "You can't do that to me."

"I'd never do that to you." Bucky ducks his head to try and catch Brock's eyes, suddenly feeling guilty as hell for getting so defensive. He's the one who's lying, even if it is to try and save his fiancé the anxiety of him talking to a work colleague times a thousand. "Never, I swear. I don't want anybody else."

"I love you." Brock sounds so wrecked, finally loosening his painful grip enough that Bucky can pull his arms free. The first thing he does is wrap them around his boyfriend in a tight embrace, because he's been such a stupid asshole to get Brock all worked up about nothing when he could have got rid of the card and prevented the whole thing if he'd just _thought_.

This is the problem with his daydreaming, the soft places he goes inside his head when he doesn't want to deal with reality. Sometimes they don't end up protecting him like he meant them to. Sometimes trying to escape the present just makes things worse when he comes back to it.

"I love you too." Bucky smooths a hand over the back of Brock's hair and finally feels the tension drain out of his muscles when Brock lets his head rest on his shoulder. He won't do anything now, won't yell or shove or fight, not when he's relaxed in Bucky's arms and safe in the knowledge that he's not about to be cheated on. Bucky belongs to him, and being reassured of that seems to have worked to defuse the bomb between them. "Go sit down, babe. I'll clean this shit up and bring you a beer or something. Okay?"

"Okay." Brock straightens up tiredly, kissing Bucky gently on the lips with a barely-audible sigh. "I shouldn't have started asking, I'm sorry. I'm just tired and you know how that…"

"I know. Don't worry. It's okay." Bucky cuts him off with a soft smile, and Brock squeezes his hand before he turns and leaves the kitchen with the heavy gait that usually follows a fight. His shoulders sag, everything seems heavy, and Bucky knows he feels like shit for letting his temper get the better of him. Brock has told him so more than once before.  

Alone in the strangely silent aftermath of lost tempers, Bucky leans against the counter (black marble, expensive, custom order that they used to fuck on when everything was still new) and takes a few forcibly slow, deep breaths as the adrenaline catches up to his brain and slams into him all at once. His elbows threaten to buckle as the shakes start and he lets them bend, lets his head rest on his hands and holds his breath to keep from crying until he feels dizzy from the lack of oxygen. He has to be quiet, he can't let Brock hear him lose it or things could start up all over again.

His eyes are blurry when he forces them open and straightens up, smearing the red-purple bruise rings on his wrists into barely shadows until he blinks a few times and brings everything into uncomfortable focus. Bucky tugs the sleeves of his sweater down to obscure the marks, because he doesn't want Brock to get upset about something that wasn't his fault, and sets about cleaning up the glass and spilled drink on the floor. He'll replace the glass this week while Brock's at work, buy him some new whiskey as an apology. Smooth things over.

Everything will go back to normal. It'll be like nothing ever happened.

Brock has some war movie on when Bucky takes him his beer, kisses him on the cheek and smiles before excusing himself to the bathroom. He sits on the edge of the bath for a few minutes, the sound of muffled gunfire coming through the closed door (no lock, Brock took those off after they kept sticking, or so he said) as he stares at his phone. Steve's contact information is all lit up for him, laid out right there on a platter just waiting for Brock to find it. Bucky should delete it and forget about his old friend before he gets himself in any more trouble. Next time he might not get away with it so easy.

But Brock already knows he's supposed to meet a guy called Steve, that hurdle has already been jumped. And Bucky can't stop thinking about the way Steve's face had lit up when he realised who he'd run into, like Bucky was _somebody_. Not a burden, not a child to be managed or looked after, not property to be catalogued and stored, but a _person_. A person who might be worth spending time with just for who he is.

_Coffee Tuesday? Sam's Place on 9 th by the bookstore? I'll buy._

Bucky adds and erases a kiss mark five times before he finally sends the message. Then he deletes the conversation, renames Steve's contact info, sets all notifications to silent, and finally changes his phone passcode before he leaves the bathroom. He curls up on the couch with Brock, slotting into his side with a strong arm around his shoulders just like he has done for the last nine years. A perfect fit.

The movie plays in front of him, but Bucky doesn't see a second of tanks and mud and the Second World War. He's thinking about what Steve might ask him on Tuesday, about how he's going to describe his life so it sounds as good as Steve's or at least passable as happy. He wonders if Steve is married, if he met someone and fell in love, if he ever thinks about that time after gym class when they were fifteen, that one time when they almost—

"Let's go to bed." Brock is turning off the TV and the hands of the wall clock have moved. Bucky can't tell if he fell asleep or just got lost in his head. It's all the same, these past few years.

He twitches a smile and takes Brock's hand, lets him lead them to bed so nobody has to think about anything anymore. It's familiar, comfortable, everything that should make Bucky happy and render the throbbing of the bruises on his wrists totally irrelevant. But it's too quiet when the world is asleep this late at night, when Brock keeps one hand possessively on his waist while unconscious and doesn't even snore, and Bucky never sleeps well when things are too still and he doesn't know what's lurking in the shadows.

He can't enjoy the silence anymore.  


	2. strike me, strike me anywhere

_See the stone set in your eyes_  
_See the thorn twist in your side_  
_I'll wait for you_

 _My hands are tied, my body bruised_  
_He got me with nothing to win_  
_And nothing left to lose_

 

Sam's Place is a small, independent café on a street corner opposite a dog park. Most of the footfall it gets are dog walkers (homemade dog biscuits free with every third hot drink, there are loyalty cards and a dog-bone hole punch to validate them) or younger retirees who still feel like they need to fill their former working hours with something outside the house. There are also a lot of professional women on maternity leave, popping in on their way to and from the nearby children's centre, so between the babies and the dogs it gets a little noisy at peak times. But the coffee is great and the pastries are homemade and delicious, so it's definitely more popular than the layer of dog hair over everything would lead you to believe.

Bucky spends the afternoon at Sam's Place a couple of times a week, bringing a book or his laptop and spreading out over a back table where he's not likely to get thumped by the tails of any of the enthusiastic larger dogs or caught in any baby-spit crossfire. He and Brock used to come here when they were apartment hunting, when Bucky didn't want to go back to his parents' place in between viewings and they spent too much of Brock's hard-earned severance check on cheap coffee and Sam's mother's shortbread. They'd been sitting in the window when they'd got the call to let them know their apartment offer had been accepted, and Brock threatened to buy the whole dessert case to celebrate before Bucky had dragged him out into the snow, laughing.

He's more comfortable in the back now, between the door to the kitchen and the old-fashioned jukebox (that hasn't worked for a year and counting) where he can see the counter and watch people come and go without the possibility of being seen through the large window at the front of the coffee shop. It means it takes Steve a minute to find him in the crowd, when he shows up bang on time on Tuesday afternoon, but it's worth the itch of potential eyes on his skin not distracting him for an hour or two.

Steve spots him at his usual table and picks his way through the sea of snoozing dogs and strollers, grinning in response to Bucky's sheepish smile. The table is pretty surrounded with babies sleeping in strollers, and he has to gingerly move a couple to fit his bulk into a chair.

"Sorry, it's quiet back here so it's like nap corner." He leans over to hug Steve, sunglasses finally gone now the drops from the pharmacy have cleared up the irritation in his eyes. It no longer feels like he's scraping sandpaper over his eyeballs every time he blinks, at least, and that's improved his mood massively.

Brock hadn't noticed, or if he had then he'd never said anything to Bucky about it. It means the three days of paranoia and trying not to look his boyfriend in the face were probably for nothing, but Bucky thinks it's better to be safe than sorry. He wonders vaguely if Steve would have been mad at him for showing up with bloodshot eyes, groggy and possibly stoned if you ignored how painfully sober he was, but then feels guilty for comparing his fiancé to somebody he used to know like they're equally as important.

"I'll try not to wake anyone up." Steve hugs him back tightly and pulls back, looking Bucky over with a small smile tugging at his lips. Bucky changed his clothes three times before he came out today, mentally berating himself all the while for caring what Steve thinks of him when he can't even bother to get out of sweats for Brock half the time. He's a terrible fiancé. "You look like you're about to join the slumber party, no offence."

"None taken, I slept like shit." Bucky laughs quietly and rubs a hand over his eyes now he's reminded of how they feel tender and bruised like ripe fruit today. He didn't sleep at all last night, mind running over potential scenarios about today as he stared at the ceiling and kept half an ear on his boyfriend's breathing to make sure he didn't wake Brock up. At least one of them might as well get some rest. "Thanks for getting coffee with me."

"Of course, I've been looking forward to it since I ran into you." There's something about Steve's expression that relaxes Bucky just by its nature, although he can't quite put his finger on what. Maybe it's that there's only one layer to it, Steve is genuinely happy to see Bucky and it runs straight through him like a stick of rock. "I'm glad you suggested Sam's, I've been coming here for years."

"I used to come here a lot, now I come work and hold babies while people pee a couple times a week. For a childless homo I'm apparently a pretty good kid whisperer." His tongue feels heavy, slightly twisted and awkward like he's not sure what to say around Steve, not sure how to filter and display himself for best response. Steve seems to find his clumsy words endearing though, from the crinkle at the corner of his eyes. "How'd you find this place?"

"Me and Sam go way back. I worked with him on a picture book… five years ago or something. Fuck, that's a long time ago." He shakes his head like he can't believe how old he is, and Bucky tries not to laugh because he knows exactly how that feels sometimes. "You live in the neighbourhood?"

"Near the Village." He goes slightly pink at the look on Steve's face, because when they were growing up affording a neighbourhood like that was totally beyond anything they could've hoped for in the future. "Yeah, I know. I'm waiting for someone to figure out I don't belong and kick me out any day now."

"You make a lot of money writing copy from home or what? I'm about to change jobs here." Steve doesn't sound bitter about it though, doesn't sound like he's talking down Bucky's job (which is _basically busywork to keep bored housewives off the bottle, though at least they find time to get their asses to the gym while they're doing it_ , as Brock once put it when they were fighting about something totally different) or making fun of him, just ribbing him like he used to.

It's… nice.

"Nah. My fiancé does corporate law, bailing out evil companies for poisoning people and shit. Probably a one-way ticket to hell, but the pay's amazing." Bucky moves to tuck hair that no longer exists behind his ear again, turning the move into a self-conscious cheek scratch because he doesn't want to look like a complete moron in front of Steve. "Where d'you live now?"

"Bed-Stuy. Can't take the boy outta Brooklyn or the Brooklyn outta the boy, apparently." That makes Bucky smile to himself and lower his eyes for a second, because he can't picture Steve anywhere but Brooklyn and it's oddly comforting to know that one thing in his life has stayed exactly as he'd expected it to. He can't say the same about anything else, but maybe one thing is just enough to convince him that the whole world can't be chaos all the time. "You remember Clint Barton?"

"The kid with the permanently broken nose?" Steve nods and Bucky squints at the ceiling for a second to draw up the image. "Yeah, I think so. You broke his nose _again_ that time and he put you in a garbage can."

"He started that." Steve defends himself immediately, and Bucky cracks up with laughter like they're still in the nurse's office with Steve holding a fistful of bloody tissues to his bony knuckles and scowling at Clint holding a fistful of bloody tissues to his nose on the opposite side of the room. "Anyway, he runs a building out there so I help him with the admin and get ten percent off my rent."

"I would've thought you'd keep your Mom's place." Bucky picks up his coffee and takes a slightly too-cool sip for the first time since Steve sat down, mainly to shut his mouth when he realises he's said something dumb and probably insensitive. "Sorry."

It's hard to imagine Sarah Rogers being dead, that's probably why he keeps forgetting and putting his foot in his mouth. Despite being as small and bird-boned as her son, she'd always seemed like one of the most _alive_ people Bucky had ever met in his short life. He has good memories attached to the apartment, climbing up the fire escape to sneak into Steve's room late at night or posing hammily for sketches by the window and getting yelled at for moving nine thousand times, but he supposes Steve probably has a lot of bad ones on top of that now.

Bucky's never lost a parent, but it's not much of a stretch to imagine not wanting to stay in the apartment where they died. For all his daydreaming saves his sanity, Brock's right when he tells Bucky he could stand to think before he opens his mouth and says something fucking stupid.

"It's alright. I didn't want to stay there so I sold it and moved in with Clint, used the money to start the illustrating company. Gotta fund my cool business cards somehow." Steve really doesn't look offended by Bucky's blunt comment, given his self-deprecating humour as usual, but Bucky still has to force his hand not to shake as he puts his coffee cup down again. He's not going to get yelled at in public, he knows that logically, but it feels like his fight-or-flight body didn't get the memo.

"I never knew he was into guys." He forces a smile through the inconvenient flash of anxiety that's made his body tense up, and imagines that he probably looks like a complete moron as he tries to keep the conversation going without going to hide in the bathroom until he gets his brain back online. "When did punching each other turn into living together?"

A distant part of him thinks _at least someone got to do that the other way around_ , but it makes his stomach knot up in guilt and he takes another sip of coffee so the unpleasant coldness keeps him in the present moment. He doesn't want to drift off into a daydream when he's catching up with Steve, his friend deserves better than that. Bucky doesn't remember conversation being this hard, maybe he's just out of the habit and it'll get easier the more he does it.

He's already made up his mind to get coffee with Steve again, he'll just have to work harder at being normal enough for Steve to want to get coffee with him. Bucky notices his sleeves have ridden up a little and discretely tugs them down so they cover the dark rings of bruises that still linger from when he pissed Brock off after he ran into Steve the first time. He's not only going to have to work harder at being normal, he's definitely going to have to be more careful about how much of himself he gives away too.

"Oh, we're not together. Just roommates." Steve laughs, and for once Bucky doesn't think it's directed at him. It's kind of nice to make someone laugh with you, not at you. "Can you imagine _that_ disaster? Pretty sure I'd end up in another garbage can after about two days."

"Kinky." Bucky makes a face like he's considering it and Steve snorts dorkily into his latte, which is just about as cute as when Bucky used to do his best to make him snort soda out of his nose at school lunch. "I'm happy you didn't end up in a garbage can, if that helps."

"Kinda does." Steve meets his eyes with an odd spark of sincerity, and Bucky can't help but smile slowly back.

It's not much, to tell someone you're happy they're not in the garbage, but it might be one of the first honest things Bucky's said for a long time, and it feels weirdly good to make someone else smile without an ulterior motive. This isn't how it feels when he makes Brock smile, it's not relief that makes him smile back or the fear of repercussion if he doesn't reciprocate. Seeing Steve smile just makes him happy, that's all.

The good feeling (absence of anxiety, steady nerves, an odd stillness in his chest that isn't nothing but might be something) lasts for about ten wonderful seconds before he catches sight of a familiar silhouette in the window of Sam's and freezes dead still in his seat. There's a weirdly exhilarating second or two when Bucky's brain goes completely to static, where he can't comprehend anything over the _this cannot be happening_ of the white noise in his head, before the reality slams into him like a brick wall and he reels, blood pumping in his ears fit to deafen him again against the knowledge that he needs to react _now_ or he might as well kiss everything he knows and needs goodbye.

There are only so many ways he can save this situation, and none of them are fool proof even if Steve does cooperate at the speed of light. Whatever Bucky manages to do here to minimise his losses (consequences deserved, lied, misbehaved when Brock was only concerned), he's definitely going to be so sore tomorrow.

One way or the other.

 

Steve has been working up to asking Bucky if there's something wrong since he sat down.

It's probably unfair to judge his behaviour based on a few minutes of conversation, given that he hasn't seen the guy for ten years and doesn't exactly have a baseline for his normal behaviour anymore (and would, frankly, by concerned if it was the same as when they were fifteen), but Steve's always had a decent read on people and he's pretty sure there's something off here. It's nothing concrete, but Bucky gives off an unfamiliar air of _trying_ all the time that doesn't feel entirely natural. Steve remembers him trying to seem too cool to care about anything at school, a lie that quickly disappeared whenever it was just the two of them and there was nobody around to give a shit how cool Bucky was, but that's not what he's seeing today.

When Bucky's mask slips today, it seems like he's trying to pilot a new body and hasn't quite worked out how to do so naturally yet. He's not doing anything _wrong_ , but Steve catches the little flickers of uncertainty in his face before he decides on an expression, the way he unconsciously braces himself after he offers an opinion (only twice in a whole conversation, which isn't the bull-headed Bucky he remembers at all), and it makes him uneasy. There's definitely something not right with his old friend, and Steve wishes he could think of a way to ask about it without sounding like an asshole.

He's not surprised to find out that Bucky has a successful husband-to-be, carefully controls the tiny flash of disappointment that wants to dart across his face when he hears that news. He'd be lying if he said he hadn't wished Bucky was single, if he hadn't been quietly hoping that coffee might become drinks and maybe a date if it turned out they still got along like they used to. It had only ever been wishful thinking, the slight hope of idle thought, but it was still a let-down to realise that they'd never get to pick up where they left off all that time ago.

They'd only ever made out once, in the locker room after gym class a few days before Bucky had to leave and Steve felt like he was losing his entire world instead of just his best friend. He can still picture the look on Bucky's face, the half-dazed star-stuck glaze of his eyes over swollen lips when they broke apart, the heat of another person so close and the wrench of breaking apart (probably too much detail to hold onto from a ten-year-old kiss, but it'd been his first and Steve's a romantic like that). They'd decided there was no point in trying to make something long-distance work out, considering Bucky had no idea where he'd be in two months, so they'd parted as friends as if that would lessen the sting of separation.

And now, ten long years later, Bucky's here right in front of him looking like something Steve sketched and trashed for being too perfect to be a person. He'd only ever painted Bucky in broad strokes, sweeping over the finer details because he was afraid they'd be impossible to get right because you can't pin light to paper. He used to regret that, but now he's glad because he couldn't have imagined what the real thing would turn out to be like. Bucky's not at all flawless, in his looks or manner, and that's what makes him brilliant in Steve's eyes (and isn't that just his old crush flaring back into life again? Right when it's impossible to fulfil? Typical).

So the awkwardness in Bucky's manner had set an itch in the back of Steve's mind, but the way his friend suddenly freezes and straightens up in his seat like he's seen a ghost ramps that up to a full-on alarm ringing. Steve twists over his shoulder to see what's freaked Bucky out instinctively, jerking back in surprise when Bucky grabs his knee under the table to get his attention.

"Buck?" The sheer _panic_ on Bucky's face is slightly terrifying. Steve has never seen him look so frightened, and the warm, unaltered atmosphere of the coffee shop around him only serves to make the sudden change of expression more unsettling.

"You work for my publishers, you're showing me proofs for a book." Bucky rattles off, bullet-quick and quiet and purposefully not looking in the direction of the counter. "We don't know each other."

"What?" Steve's pretty sure he's gaping like some kind of idiot, but it's not like he knows exactly how to respond to his pleasant coffee date turning into some kind of spy movie. "Bucky, what the hell—"

"We don't know each other, we just met." Bucky repeats firmly, cutting him off as he sits back and finally takes his hand off Steve's knee. He doesn't realise until the pressure is gone that Bucky's been grabbing him tight enough to bruise. There's a restrained wildness to the wide eyes turned on him pleadingly that scares the hell out of him, especially when Bucky sounds so desperate and _begs_. "Please, Steve."

"Okay." He promises, bewildered, which makes Bucky blow out a too-shallow breath of something that's definitely not close enough to relief for Steve's liking. "But you've gotta tell me what's—"

"Hi!" Bucky jumps out of his seat with a wide smile, skirting around chairs and baby carriages and looking totally normal, completely removed from the utter panic that had been coming off him in waves moments earlier. Bucky suddenly radiating sunshine like he's trying to fill a black hole all on his own might be the most unsettling thing that's come from this already extremely unsettling incident.

Steve follows his eye line to the dark haired, stocky guy approaching their table, looking out of place with the dogs and baby carriages scattered around the café and the general shabby ("Shabby-chic, philistine," as Sam insists) décor. The guy looks like he should be in a boxing ring instead of a business suit, all barely-contained strength and hard angles, with sharp cheekbones and jaw and a nose that's clearly been broken more than once. And way too much gel slicking his hair back, Steve thinks in a moment of bitchiness that he's not proud of. But, still, he's not lying.

"I thought you were at work." Bucky sounds bright and happy, a total one-eighty from the way he'd been whispering feverishly to Steve a moment ago, and even far removed from the tense, slightly nervous way he'd been holding himself earlier. Steve would be offended by the turn-around if he wasn't fairly convinced it was fake.

"Lunch break, decided to stop by for old time's sake." The guy kisses Bucky on the cheek, the image of a perfect gentleman, and things just got weirder for Steve because with the way Bucky had been acting he'd expected someone to come up and punch him. "Am I interrupting?"

"Nah, of course not." Bucky turns back to Steve with a smile, anxiety betrayed only by the tightness around his eyes and stiffness in his movements as he obviously tries very, very hard to show how _normal_ everything is. "This is Steve, we're just going over proofs for his book."

He gestures vaguely at the Ipad sitting on the table between them, and Steve gets a weird twist in his stomach when he realises that Bucky had _planned_ for the eventuality that someone would ask what they were doing together. That he'd foreseen the possibility that they might get caught together and he'd have to explain himself. The Ipad isn't there by accident, neither are the printed-out pages of text that he'd assumed Bucky had been reading before he got here.

Bucky _staged_ their table because he knew he might have to lie about what he's doing. Steve feels slightly nauseous at the idea because he's not sure what the hell to think anymore.

"Steve, this is my fiancé Brock." Bucky introduces them with another winning smile, and Steve finds his fingers in the crushing grip of a man trying to intimidate before he even opens his mouth.

The introduction makes things even worse, because although Steve might never have had a relationship long or intense enough to turn into an engagement, he's pretty sure that the abject terror that had passed over Bucky's face at Brock's unexpected arrival isn't how people are supposed to act around the love of their life. And why the secrecy around being friends with Steve? He would've understood the furtive instructions if the man had been Bucky's boss and they were caught meeting while he was supposed to be on the clock, for example, but Steve just can't understand why it's so important that Bucky's boyfriend doesn't know he's meeting a friend for coffee.

"Nice to meet you." He smiles politely and shakes Brock's hand back, hiding a wince when his fingers are finally removed from the iron grip.

"You too." Brock is still perfectly polite, standing a half-shoulder in front of Bucky who's fallen back like that's his natural place. Still, Steve feels like he's being assessed under the man's gaze, weighed up and examined for defects. "I heard you're an illustrator, what's the book about?"

"Uh, explaining PTSD to kids in military families." It's actually the book he'd worked on with Sam, the first thing that comes to mind because Sam is in his field of vision and Steve's not sure what else to say and sound natural. Sam is watching them from behind the counter, expression closed like he's paying more attention to the interaction than he should be for how innocuous it is. "Basically. And stuff like disability and parents being gone. Pictures make it easier for the little kids."

"Sounds like an interesting project." Brock nods, glancing sideways to look at Bucky whose face is held tight in a mask of bland neutrality that Steve finds pretty unnerving if he looks at it for too long. It's slightly android and not Bucky at all. "Should've told me about it, sounds fascinating."

"Y'know I always forget to talk about work stuff." Bucky smiles, self-deprecating with a head-duck for good measure, and for some reason Steve thinks of the nature documentaries Clint has on in the background every time he gets home from work at a reasonable hour.

_...bears its throat for the alpha male in an attempt to appease…_

"It happens." Brock reaches up to squeeze the back of Bucky's neck affectionately and his boyfriend _beams_ in a way that also doesn't match any of his other behaviour. He's flat then anxious then scared of Brock and suddenly lights up at his approval like a little boy? Steve doesn't understand any of this.

But, he'll admit, he's not content to just ignore all the weirdness because Bucky is smiling at the moment. And there's part of him that bristles at the vague idea that Bucky is putting all this energy into presenting a front to his fiancé and then being ecstatic at receiving tiny gestures of affection in return. Steve knows he's probably being bitter about missing his chance with Bucky or reading things into a very limited situation, but he's not stupid and his bad feeling remains even as Bucky looks totally enraptured with Brock's affection.

"Usually publishers are difficult to work with." Steve figures he should help Bucky impress his boyfriend, even if he's not totally on board with whatever the hell they're doing right now. "But Bucky's great, he's made it easy."

He'd always assumed that the phrase 'went white as a sheet' was purple prose constructed for gothic novels and bad romance books (his grandmother had a notable Mills and Boon collection whose depictions of 'throbbing engorged members' had definitely helped Steve to realise his sexuality and also made him take out shares in brain bleach), that is until he sees all the blood drain from Bucky's face in five seconds flat. He goes from radiating energy to freezing solid in moments as a vacuum of silence forms around them, only for seconds that feel like minutes before Brock turns to him.

"Bucky?" His voice is level, expression mildly curious but dark eyes something else entirely. "Who the hell is Bucky?"

 

Bucky can't breathe.

The coffee shop and all its assorted sounds and smells, the babble of babies and heavy breathing of sleeping dogs and underneath it all the scent of baking and spilled coffee, it all fades away to nothing as Bucky's focus becomes solely on Brock. Because Brock doesn't call him Bucky ( _I'm not calling you that in public, it's a kid's dumb nickname and you're not a kid anymore_ ), nobody calls him Bucky, nobody he casually knew from work would have the faintest idea to call him Bucky, and there Steve is letting it roll off his tongue like he's been saying it his whole life. And Bucky has no way to undo what just happened.

All he can do is watch Brock and try to figure out how the hell he's going to do damage control this time. Bucky knows every shift of breathing, every millimetre of squared shoulders and the muscle tightening in his jaw, and he knows exactly how things would go down if they weren't in front of people. He knows about the screaming match that's just one wrong move outside their bubble of public propriety.

Worst of all, he knows exactly what he's in for when they're _not_ in public. Because now Brock has enough ammunition to argue that Bucky has lied to him (and he _has_ , he was trying to protect his boyfriend but he _did_ lie and that means he deserves whatever he has coming to him), which means it's only a matter of time until he confronts him about it. Which is why Bucky's heart is so loud in his ears that he can't hear anything except the relentless, guilty nausea of

_found out found out found out_

"Oh, sorry. It's my main character, I've been calling everyone Bucky by accident for like a month." Steve, bless his giant fucking heart, is clearly smarter than Bucky because he figures out the situation quickly and tries to do damage control while Bucky is still trying to swallow without choking on panic.

It's not enough, not enough by far because Steve can't know that Brock is aware of the old nickname, can't know that this just took the pile of shit and set it on fire because now Brock thinks there's really something to hide with two layers of lies, but Bucky can't blame him for trying. His chest aches in gratitude, in fact, because it's been so long since he felt like there was someone on his side that wasn't his fiancé. Since someone tried to make him comfortable for no reason other than he asked them to.

It's a stupid thing to think, he tells himself as soon as the thought crosses his treacherous mind, because Brock would do anything for him if he just asked. But Bucky stopped asking a long time ago, it stopped being worth the trouble to object or suggest or do anything but go along with what made Brock happy. Relationships are compromise, right? He just wanted Brock to be happy.

And now he's lied and been caught _and_ thought badly of his boyfriend on top of that. Bucky deserves whatever happens to him next, he knows that for a fact.   

"I guess it happens a lot." Brock is saying to Steve, pleasant and polite and not at all strained and tight like Bucky feels. He's a good person to keep himself together in spite of how hurt he probably is, to not call Bucky out in public and spare him the humiliation. It's more than he deserves. "Anyway, I've gotta get back to the office. Nice to meet you, Steve."

He turns to Bucky and kisses him on the cheek again, and Bucky leans into the touch for as long as he can because the front of kindness will be the last time he can snatch affection before Brock turns cold with anger when they're behind closed doors. Knowing he's upset his fiancé is the worst thing, knowing he's _made_ him angry by doing something wrong is worse than any cuts and bruises he might come out of the inevitable confrontation with. So Bucky tries to burn the feel of Brock's lips on his skin into his memory because he's not sure when he'll get the chance to feel them again.

"I'll be home around seven." Brock pulls back, and only Bucky can see the ice behind his eyes. He's _fucked_. "If you're there."

"I will be." He forces a smile, but Brock is already turning and walking away without a backwards glance. The coldness of being brushed aside like nothing is worse than being yelled at, and Bucky shivers sadly like a dying plant that's been shoved in a closet, the sunlight snatched away.

The clock above the counter ( _don't look at Sam, don't make him think you want to talk because he's tried to talk about this before and it only made everything worse_ ) says one-thirty. That gives Bucky almost six hours before the consequences of his actions slam into him as hard and unstoppable as a freight train. Six hours of waiting, anticipating, and panicking. 

He wonders if he could do something to soften the blow, if he could clean the apartment and make dinner and get Brock the beer he likes and that would be enough of an apology. Brock would walk into the apartment ready for a fight, but then he'd see how hard Bucky had worked to show him he's sorry for lying, how much he appreciates everything his fiancé does for him, and the anger would just melt away under the bright light of Bucky's love. Bucky would fall into his arms and find a way to convince Brock that he's enough, that he doesn't want anyone else, and Brock would be sad that any of this had happened, but he'd be benevolent and kiss Bucky and everything would be –

"Buck?" Steve's voice brings him out of his what-if wander with a jolt, and Bucky realises he's still standing where Brock left him, shaking slightly from impotent adrenaline in between baby carriages and mismatched chairs. Steve doesn't look angry, and Bucky's too fuzzy to read anything else in his expression. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I need to go." The frozen feeling leeches out of his limbs and Bucky suddenly feels way too keyed-up, anxious and buzzing and far too present even though he'd much rather stay in his fantasy world if he had the slightest choice in the matter. He finally looks at Steve, which is a mistake because he'd much rather stay here with Steve than deal with the fallout of his fuck-up too. "I'm sorry."

"Wait a minute, talk to me." Steve stops him when Bucky goes to gather up his stuff, a hand on his wrist that unknowingly bites into the hidden, healing bruises and makes him wince. "What's going on? Why did we have to lie about knowing each other?"

"It's nothing. It's my fault, I was just trying…" He stops himself and gets his words in order, because he can make Brock sound like an asshole by accident sometimes (which is part of the reason he'd stopped talking to his family, because they never listened to what he actually said and just read their own conclusions into everything) and he doesn't want to turn Steve against his boyfriend too. "Brock has self-esteem issues, he thinks he's not good enough for me and gets worried about me going off with other guys. I thought it'd be easier on him to just say I was working so he wouldn't worry. It was dumb, I know."

"That sounds kinda… paranoid." Steve is clearly trying to moderate his voice, which only makes Bucky nervous because he likes to know how people actually feel so he can try to accommodate it to his advantage. He knows he was paranoid to not tell Brock the truth in the first place, he doesn't need Steve to tell him that. "Does he get like that about all your friends?"

"I don't really have any." Bucky mumbles distractedly, pulling away from Steve's loose grip and grabbing his messenger bag to shove his papers and Ipad into, almost knocking over what's left of his cup of coffee in his hurry. If he can just get home and make everything perfect then maybe things will be alright.

He feels like he's in a tailspin, cold sweat prickling at the back of his neck because he's pretty sure he's fucked up his relationship and getting his friendship with Steve back at the same time with one massive mistake. He should have just told Brock the truth in the first place, should have got all the unpleasantness out in the open then so that by this point his fiancé would have cooled down and been able to accept the idea of Bucky meeting a friend. If he'd just been honest then maybe Brock would have seen he had nothing to hide and maybe –

Bucky cuts his racing thoughts off and looks at Steve again, forcing himself to slow down and take a breath and stop acting like a crazy person. Steve already thinks he's being paranoid, he should do something to convince him he's not completely unstable.

"I'm really sorry for dragging you into this. I know I kinda fucked up hanging out." He twitches a sheepish smile that's not as convincing as he'd like, but his energy is focused elsewhere right now and Steve doesn't seem to need handling the same way Brock does. "Another time, maybe? I'd like to meet up again, if you want to."

"Yeah, sure." Steve is still watching him with a strange look on his face, and Bucky feels slightly hysterical because a big part of him wants to grab Steve's shoulders and insist that _no no we have to rewind to before I fucked up we have to go back to when you liked me_. "I'll call you?"

"Uh, better text. I usually keep my phone on silent." Is that normal? From the look on Steve's face Bucky can extrapolate that something about it isn't, and he wants to punch himself in the face and cry because he'd been having _fun_ , he'd been having a good time with someone he likes and then he'd sent it all to hell and now he might not get it back. "I… I'm really sorry about today, Steve. I didn't mean to mess this up and cut everything short and…"

"Buck, it's okay. You didn't mess anything up, shit happens." Steve's expression is even harder to read now, and Bucky needs to get the hell out of here before his mouth gets him in even more trouble. He shouldn't even be making plans to see Steve again, not with how upset Brock's going to be when he gets home, but he just got Steve back and he's not about to lose him again if he doesn't have to. "Are you sure you're okay? You seem kinda shaken up."

"I'm fine, I'm fine. Don't worry." He waves Steve off with a slightly better smile (because concern is like catnip to him because it's only one step removed from affection and god knows Bucky will crawl through broken glass to get some of that these days) and shoulders his bag, steadying himself and trying to look like he's not running eight scenarios about tonight through his head at once. "Text me, yeah? I'll make sure I check for it."

Before his conscious brain can tell him he's being a fucking moron and stop him, Bucky leans down and kisses Steve on the cheek to say goodbye. He almost freezes again when he realises what he's done, because what if Brock came back and saw him do that? What if Brock saw him kissing someone he lied about not knowing, right there in public where he'd just been kind enough not to humiliate Bucky, which he clearly didn't deserve. What if –

"I was gonna ask." Steve sounds ever so slightly strained, but his expression isn't giving much away outside of the tension just tugging at the corner of his mouth to tell Bucky that he's holding something back. Hopefully not disgust, because he's already said he'll meet up with Bucky again and hopefully that hasn't been shattered by the work of a thoughtless moment. "What do people call you now?"

"Jim." Bucky feels like he might disappear, standing there in the coffee shop right in the middle of all the life he's totally detached from. Maybe things would be better if he did just melt away into the floor with the rest of the dirt, because he might as well be a ghost for all he can touch the life around him. "Everyone calls me Jim."

"I thought you hated Jim." Steve frowns, and Bucky almost laughs in some strange, humourless way because it's so startling to be around someone who actually knows how he feels about stuff. Or cares, maybe that's the real issue.

"Things change, I guess." His smile is smaller, less flashy, but genuine this time. Turning and walking out of the café (avoiding Sam who clearly tries to catch his attention to talk to him on the way out) is hard, because every step away from Steve feels like distance that he won't be able to take back. Not that he deserves to take it back, not after the absolute mess he's made of everything today.

Bucky's made his bed, now he has to go home and lie in it.

 

"I'm worried about you."

Brock's voice is low, softer than usual as he holds the ice pack to Bucky's cheek. Bucky keeps his eyes on his hands, curled limply in his lap while he sits on the edge of the bath and lets Brock tend to him without resistance. He's got nothing left in the tank, no fight or flight after it all came roaring out of him tonight, and the careful treatment is welcome because he's not sure he could bring himself to do more than crawl into bed if left to his own devices.

This is exactly why he needs Brock, because his self-preservation is for shit if he's not pushed in the right direction. He needs managing just as carefully as Brock does, even if most of the time he doesn't want to admit it to himself. He _needs_ Brock, even if he doesn't deserve him.

Things had escalated tonight, in spite of Bucky's best efforts to have the apartment in order and dinner on the table, which had been unpleasant but not unexpected. He'd tried to explain his reasons for lying when Brock went immediately on the offensive, ended up backed up against the fridge until being trapped made him aggressive and he pushed his boyfriend away. That had earned him a fist to his cheekbone and brought an end to the yelling, the relief of silence almost worth the sharp burst of pain.

Brock had dropped to his knees hard on the tiled floor (imported stone, underfloor heating, brand new last year) and grabbed Bucky's face with bruising fingers, checking him over with such desperation that it hurt.

Love hurts, Bucky's come to accept that now.

_"Baby, I'm so sorry. Lemme see. I'll get some ice. Why did you make me do that?"_

"You're acting weird lately. You're lying about stuff and hiding things. Getting defensive and paranoid and getting in my face so I…" Brock trails off and brushes wayward hair gently off Bucky's forehead with his fingertips. He's taking such care that a voice in the back of Bucky's head thinks _maybe I should piss him off more often if he acts like this afterwards_. "It's not normal. I think you should talk to a doctor."

"I'm fine." Bucky mumbles, words thick from the lump in his throat that forms when Brock is tender like this, when he cares _so_ much in spite of how awful Bucky is to him. Bucky lied to him and provoked him and here he is, being coddled and cared for by his boyfriend in a way he definitely doesn't deserve.

He used to make Brock so happy. He used to be the best thing that ever happened to Brock and they used to call off work and stay home just to be in each other's company. Bucky used to be the light of his life, and it feels like all he's done lately is cause his fiancé pain.

"Sweetheart, you're not." Brock moves the ice pack to check the swelling and Bucky doesn't hold back his wince when the bruise is jostled. And it _will_ bruise, he won't be able to go out for days now without everyone knowing how fucking stupid he is because he's a grown man who couldn't even tell his boyfriend he wanted to meet someone for coffee until things got too fucked up for him to hide it. "You're making me crazy, I think that's a pretty good indicator that you're not okay. I'm so worried about you Jim, please let me help."

It's so quiet in the bathroom, no sound but the whisper-soft crackle of the ice pack slowly melting against Bucky's cheek and the too-fast beating of his heart. He wonders what Steve would think if he walked in on this, on Brock kneeling in front of him with bruised knuckles and fearful eyes and Bucky curled in on himself like a child who couldn't control himself and lashed out when he lost his temper. Steve thought he was being paranoid too, and he's got no reason to tell Bucky anything but the truth. He's just glad Brock stopped his temper tantrum before he went further, because he couldn't have handled hurting him by accident over something so stupid.

"M'sorry." His voice is quiet and he tries to keep his emotions locked down in case he just pisses Brock off again, but then there's the brush of lips on his forehead and Bucky crumbles like he can't control himself. It's too easy to take him apart.

Maybe Brock's right. Maybe there is something wrong with him.

"Hey, shh. It's okay baby, we'll figure it out. We'll get you some help." Brock lets Bucky slump into his arms and holds him tight, doesn't care about getting tears all over his shirt as Bucky clings to him like he can't let go. "I've got you."

 _Yeah_ , Bucky thinks, with his face buried in Brock's shoulder and not sure if he's clinging to him because he'll help him float or sink. Y _ou've got me._


	3. and you give yourself away

_Wouldn't mind the hanging_  
_But the laying in a grave so long,_  
_Poor boy_

 

"I don't know the guy, I've only spoken to him a couple of times. But I don't like him."

Sam doesn't pull punches. Two tours in Afghanistan and a subsequent career dealing with pensioners and babies will do that to a person (he continues to insist that an after-school shift in the café is tougher than a tour, because it's easier to joke with people who don't understand). He especially doesn't censor himself if he thinks there's something iffy going on with someone he gives a crap about, which is probably why he and Steve get along so well. They both have a thing about injustice.

"So I'm not crazy, right?" Steve takes a bite of the Major Milk Makin' cookie that Sam makes ostensibly for breastfeeding mothers, but it's a delicious massive calorie bomb that helps Steve maintain his crazy muscle mass so he's not about to give a shit what it's called, and frowns. He didn't intend to turn the conversation to Bucky, but it kind of happened all on its own. "They're… weird."

"Look at it like this, Bucky is the sweetest kid. All the moms love him and give him their kids to hold when they go to the bathroom, and moms don't just hand their baby to anyone, they _know_." Luckily (or unluckily, more accurately), Sam agrees with Steve's trepidation about his friend's relationship and lets him dodge any awkward questions about why he cares so much. "But when his boyfriend's around, the guy turns into some kind of robot. Like some Stepford Wife shit."

"I saw." The edges of the tablecloth are frayed ("Vintage!") and Steve toys with a loose thread for something to do with his fingers while he thinks.  "I dunno what to do about it."

"There's nothing you can do." Sam shrugs, looking resigned rather than nonchalant as he checks his watch and gets up wearily. His lunch break finished a good five minutes ago and Peggy has been eyeballing him from behind the counter for at least ten, but it takes a lot of levering to get anything out of Steve and he's willing to piss off his co-worker over it, just a little. Even if she is unfairly terrifying for her size. "I tried to bring it up vaguely once and he didn't come back in for a month, he's not exactly open to discussion."

"Seriously? That's not weird at all." Steve deadpans, getting up along with Sam because he really should get back to work instead of hiding out in coffee shops thinking about Bucky Barnes. Story of his life since they ran into each other again, really. "I'm worried about him."

"Yeah, well just make sure you put your boner away if you try and talk to him about it." The warning brings a slight flush high on Steve's cheeks, because he hadn't thought he was being _that_ obvious. "Last thing he needs is the creepy boyfriend to think he's cheating."

"I got that last time." The production about pretending to be work colleagues has been nagging at him ever since it happened. It was just too much effort for someone to go to just to avoid slightly pissing off their fiancé, and Steve doesn't know what else was behind the fear in Bucky's eyes but he has the distinct feeling that it's not good. They don't have time for that discussion right now, though.

He pulls Sam into a hug, the familiar squeeze of friendship that they give each other every time they meet. They'd started out as strictly working together, when the graphic design company Steve had been working for at the time had been commissioned to do the cover of Sam's children's book. Steve had taken one look at the extremely ugly illustrations and sketched up his own in protest, sent them to the writer simply to act as suggestions for changes, and found himself being paid to redraw the entire book twenty-four hours later. His no-bullshit email to Sam had swung things in his favour, and pretty soon they were hanging out regularly, friendship deepening in spite of Sam's momentary, massive crush.

Steve never found out about the crush until it had well and truly died. Getting drunk, crying about being single, and throwing up in a guy's bathroom on a Tuesday night ("Heard _and_ saw it a little bit, man.") will generally kill any lust, he's been reliably informed.

"See you Thursday, right?" Steve finally lets Sam go and grabs his portfolio from beside the table. He was across town this morning meeting with a client and his bag is full of nude sketches. Clint hasn't stopped making fun of him over it for a week straight. "Promise I won't talk about my high school sweetheart the entire time."

"I'll believe that when I see it." Sam snorts, plucking his apron from the back of his chair and retying it with practiced speed. "Just be a friend, alright? Don't go fishing if he's not gonna bite, because that shit never ends well."

"Okay Dad." Steve rolls his eyes and Sam punches him on the arm before he finally goes to take over from an increasingly-unamused Peggy. The lunchtime rush is just picking up and the coffee shop is getting crammed, so it's probably best he takes off before his portfolio gets knocked over and child-scarring images spill out everywhere.

Despite Sam's advice (a phrase that applies to a disproportionate amount of Steve's life decisions), Steve can't shake the nagging worry about Bucky and decides to text him while he walks to the subway. The streets are crowded despite the drizzly weather and he almost runs an old lady over (walking stick to the shin for his trouble) before he gets a clue and stands still to text like a human being. He forgets how big he is sometimes, still tries to move through crowds like he's small and skinny enough to fill in the gaps.

_Hey. What's up? Hope I didn't get you in trouble the other day._

Bucky doesn't reply until Steve's back in his apartment nearly an hour later. He's busy sketching when his phone buzzes off the table and hits the floor, sending him after it cursing and hoping he hasn't woken Clint up in the room below. Their apartment has two levels, stairs in the middle of the open-plan living room/kitchen leading up to an open half-floor that Steve has turned into his bedroom and studio. Clint's room is directly underneath his, and his EMT roommate just got off a fourteen hour night-shift and won't appreciate Steve's clutzy attitude to personal electronic devices waking him up. Again.

The text message is brief and to the point, complete with typo like it was composed in a hurry. Which doesn't make Steve worry even more, or anything.

_Nm dont worry abut it x_

The kiss makes him feel… something he probably shouldn't, but that doesn't stop Steve tapping out a reply without trying to wait a cool amount of time to send it. He gave up trying to be cool a very long time ago when he realised that no matter how big and strong he got the one thing he'd never achieve was _cool_. He gets too excited about graphite sticks and acid-free paper for that.

_Want to get coffee sometime this week maybe?_

It takes another hour or so for the reply to come, less rushed and carefully picked out of the keyboard. It feels like it was deliberated over, which Steve isn't sure is a totally rational assessment to make from text, but it's just a feeling. He tends to go with his gut when it comes to people, and with Bucky he doesn't have a lot else but some dated memories and new suspicions to go on.

  _Yeah. Somewhere not Sams? If thats ok x_

They arrange a place and time over the course of the evening, long stretches between Bucky's texts unless Steve replies to him almost immediately. Steve tries not to think about whether he's having to hide their communication from his boyfriend, texting in the bathroom or pretending Steve is someone else, tilting his phone so the screen is hidden and he doesn't get in whatever kind of trouble he was so worried about when Brock caught them in the café. Maybe it's not trouble, maybe he was telling the truth that he just wanted to spare his fiancé the paranoia of thinking Bucky would cheat on him, but that's not the body language Steve saw and it doesn't sound healthy either way. Not that Steve can say a lot about healthy relationships, but he's smart enough to know when he's looking at one that's not.

That's how their communication carries on for a while, increasingly strange and furtive texts on Bucky's end, then deceptive normality when they meet up for coffee or lunch or any pretext just to spend time with each other. Bucky doesn't mention his fiancé except in passing, and even the occasional small insights Steve gets into their relationship set off alarm bells in the back of his mind. Brock only ever seems to come up in the context of 'he doesn't like' or 'he won't let me' or 'he prefers it when I don't', but Bucky is a master of changing the subject if Steve ever tries to press him further. He might be reading too far into things, but it's starting to feel distinctly like he's not.

("You _don't_ like the boyfriend of the guy you're in love with?" Clint does a terrible impression of being shocked when Steve asks his roommate what he thinks he should do about the situation. The fact Clint is bolting down cereal over the sink before another night shift probably doesn't help his overwhelming sarcasm. "I'm shocked, Rogers. _Shocked_.")

They meet up over a month or so, once or twice a week, without many problems. Bucky gets antsier towards (what he doesn't know at the time is) the end, but they get closer and closer as they build their new friendship on the foundations of what they had before. Then one day Steve's text goes unanswered. After one hour, two, a whole day later, a week and more texts, there's still no answer.

Bucky goes silent. It's as if he just fell off the face of the Earth.

 

"C'mon sweetheart, I gotta get to a meeting."

Bucky is hiding in bed when Brock calls him from the kitchen, and he makes a discontented noise in his throat and burrows down further under the covers in response. He knows he should get up and stop being such a baby, hiding away from the world like it'll go away if he can't see it, but he just doesn't have the energy.

It's raining outside, dull morning light trickling weakly through the bedroom blinds and giving everything a slightly dreamlike quality that doesn't help Bucky feel inclined to stay conscious. The pills Dr Zola prescribed are some kind of downer with a long name Bucky was too upset to pay much attention to, cringing in on himself with shame in the doctor's office while Brock held his hand and explained what had been going on with his moods. It was embarrassing to not even be able to explain his problems himself, to have to rely on his fiancé to tell the doctor about the paranoia, the lying and mood swings, the aggression and losing his temper.

There was a message from Steve when Bucky got home, sitting there waiting for him once Brock had tucked him into bed and he was alone enough to check his phone. Bucky had stared at the text for a long time, neon brightness hurting his red eyes in the darkened bedroom where he was supposed to be sleeping, supposed to be _behaving_ himself. He deleted the message with one jab of a trembling finger, Steve's disguised information with a few more, and threw his phone across the room before he buried his face in the pillow and wondered if it was possible to suffocate himself by accident.

Steve has texted a few times since, but Bucky hadn't even opened the messages before deleting them. He hasn't left the apartment since they got back from seeing the doctor, and he's too ashamed to try and explain to Steve why he's falling asleep or slurring or anything else the medication makes him do. He doesn't even want to imagine what his friend might say, for once.

Steve's too good to get sucked into the black hole Bucky creates wherever he goes. He's sure of that.

"Jim, babe? You awake?" Brock is at the bedroom door now, coming closer as inevitably as a car crash. Bucky wonders what would happen if he just stayed limp, if he rolled over and ignored Brock and how quickly he would bring hell down on himself. The thought makes guilt roll in his gut, because it's unfair when all his boyfriend has done is take care of him.

Brock supervises Bucky taking his medication every morning before he leaves for work. It's become the worst part of Bucky's day.

"Aw baby, is it bad today?" There's the quiet clink of a mug being set on the nightstand, the plastic _tic_ of a pill bottle, and then a warm hand carding soothingly through his hair. Bucky nods dutifully without opening his eyes, the affectionate touch tearing all the teeth from his uncharitable thoughts about Brock.

He doesn't know if he actually feels bad because of the side-effects from the medication or if he just doesn't want Brock to get mad at him for not getting up on time, but he'll go along with whatever he's supposed to say to keep the peace. He's not sure how long it's supposed to take him to adjust to the pills, it's been three weeks now and he's still spending most of the day sleeping or picking his way listlessly through his editing work (Brock has spoken to his boss, explained the circumstances, and Bucky's workload has been sympathetically reduced to practically nothing for the time being). He made it down to collect the mail a couple of times, but the doorman had watched him like a hawk until he was safely back in the elevator so he hasn't bothered lately.

He's managed to keep the apartment clean despite his endless exhaustion, at least. That's something he can still do for his fiancé, a tiny gesture, a token in return for how much Brock looks after him. Bucky's pretty sure he felt better before he started taking the medication, but Brock wouldn't let him take it if it was bad for him, surely. It's just adjusting, that's what Bucky keeps telling himself.

"Sit up and take these and then you can go back to sleep, okay?" Brock's voice is a little rough and honey-sweet, gentle persuasion that makes Bucky guilty that he thought of grabbing hands and force instinctively. Maybe the pills will make the paranoia go away if he just tries hard enough. "I put that vanilla syrup crap in your coffee, c'mon."

The soft tone of his voice, the gentle touch of his hand, the _care_ , that's what persuades Bucky out of his head enough to sit up like his muscles barely work.

He's still wrapped in Brock's old college boxing sweater, soft and comfortable and totally unattractive. Bucky claimed it as his own the first morning they'd spent together, when he woke up to an empty bed and the smell of pancakes and had fumbled through unfamiliar drawers for something to put on in case this guy had roommates and he shouldn't walk out naked. He'd wandered into the kitchen in boxers and the faded green sweater, and Brock had looked over his shoulder (making pancakes shirtless at the stove, all the rippling muscles Bucky had drunkenly groped in the club on full display, tattoos he hadn't seen last night crawling up shoulders and down to elbows, professional length ink) and smiled so openly at the sight of him that it made all the air leave Bucky's lungs in one punched exhale.

 _"Suits you."_ He'd craned back to kiss Bucky when he walked over, slow and dirty before Bucky hooked his chin over his shoulder and Brock went back to flipping blueberry pancakes like something out of a magazine. _"You should keep it."_

"Sorry." Bucky mumbles hoarsely, holding out his hand for Brock to carefully tap the pills into. He feels so confused since he started on the medication that he clings to Brock's guidance with both hands, which makes him feel queasy in a way he's pretty sure is nothing to do with the drugs.

"It's not your fault, sweetheart. You're sick." Brock leans down and kisses him on the forehead, a light brush of lips as he presses the mug of coffee insistently into Bucky's free hand. He's already in his shoes and jacket, probably running late, probably putting even more stress on himself just to handle his stupid boyfriend. "I'm gonna be back late, are you gonna be okay?"

"Yeah. How come?" He's staring at the chalky little pills in his hand, but not so intensely that he doesn't notice the slight twitch in Brock's expression that says he's lying. He's never been a master of subtlety, never had to be because Bucky never disagrees with him strongly enough to question any of his obvious lies.

Until now, anyway.

"Late meeting, that's all." He taps Bucky's leg, starting to get impatient to divert attention from whatever he's lying about. "Take your pills, I'm gonna be late."

"Sorry." Bucky apologises for the second time in the twenty minutes since he woke up, that has to be a new record even for him. He puts the pills obediently in his mouth, taking a sip of coffee as Brock presses another quick kiss to his head and rushes out of the apartment with a hurried goodbye tossed over his shoulder.

As soon as the heavy apartment door (custom-made, environmentally-friendly reclaimed wood, reinforced for security) swings shut and clicks closed, Bucky forces his sluggish limbs to move. He forces himself out of bed, shivering involuntarily at the cold wooden floor under his bare feet for a second before he stumbles to the bathroom. The door doesn't lock behind him anymore, so he scrambles to scoop the quickly-dissolving pills out from under his tongue and drop them in the toilet, trying not to gag on the chemical taste as he flushes them away and washes his mouth out with the tap.

He slumps wearily against the bathroom wall and closes his eyes for a second, mind wandering at will because he doesn't have to be uncomfortably alert when he's alone. He wonders what would happen if Brock walked in, saw him flushing the pills that don't seem to do anything to improve his moods at all. Saw Bucky defying him and _lying_ again just the same way Brock _lied_ to his face about why he's going to be late home from work. Brock would grab him, probably shove him up against the wall he's propping himself up on and force the pills into his mouth, cover his airways until he swallowed for his own good.

_Steve wouldn't do that._

Bucky's eyes snap open to shove the image away and he scrubs his hand over his already-sore face to find he's crying again. This has been happening lately, since Brock took him to the doctor and asked the doorman to keep an eye on Bucky in case the medication made him confused in the beginning and he wandered off. Since he's been stuck inside, watching the people on the street below not to make up stories about them out of idle curiosity but because he misses being among them. The only story that'll be written about him any time soon is the princess in the tower, maybe the crazy boy locked in the attic to keep him away from polite company.

Brock's just keeping him under wraps for his own good. Bucky's almost sure of that. The problem is that the _almost_ is becoming bigger and bigger every day, so big it threatens to suffocate him like a strong hand over his mouth or the pillow he screams into so nobody can hear him and think he's ungrateful.

He forces himself to take a deep breath and splashes cold water on his face, making the mistake of glancing at the mirror and taking in the dark circles set deep in his pale face with a grimace. His skin is breaking out and his hair is greasy because he hasn't had the energy to shower as much as he should, how can Brock stand to look at him like this? At least Steve hasn't seen him, and doesn't that thought just make him feel even more like shit because why should he care more about what _Steve_ thinks than the man he's going to marry?

Bucky shoves the thoughts away, trying to avoid the kind of depressing spiral that could have Brock hauling him back to the doctor and doubling his pills. He dries his face and straightens his back, because he's going to have more energy without taking the medication so he might as well do something productive with it. Maybe if he cleans the apartment and makes everything nice and just tries harder then Brock –

Brock who lied to him –

It hurts Bucky's head to think about, so he doesn't. He buries himself in bleach and a midday beer and tries not to think about anything at all.

 

When someone knocks on the door in the late afternoon, it makes Bucky jump half out of his skin.

He's been dozing on the couch, some shitty reality show playing in the background while he nods in and out of consciousness, groggy even without a fresh dose of medication in his system. He'd been half-watching Dr Phil until the next episode turned out to be focused on domestic violence and made him feel weirdly ashamed enough to change the channel. He's nodding off to Sammi and Snooki screaming at each other when the loud knocking sounds and jerks him suddenly wide awake, heart hammering like a scared rabbit's and mind in overdrive as he picks his way cautiously to the door.

It can't be Brock, Brock wouldn't knock at his own door. And it can't be the neighbours because they're ninety-five and practically dead and never leave their apartment. It might be his boss, someone from work coming to fire him and cut off his last contact that Brock doesn't control. His last contact except –

"Steve?" Bucky blurts out when he pulls the door open and stands there stunned, stock still in shock and his sock feet at the sight of his friend actually here in real life and not just his imagination.

The face that's been swimming through his dreams, the man he's been comparing his fiancé to and finding him wanting (his fiancé _now_ , back at the start Brock was everything and Bucky was his world and things were like an oversaturated bubble of happiness that only made the crash worse when it crept between them like a virus), is suddenly right in front of him. Bucky suddenly feels so, so self-conscious in a way he rarely does with Steve, hyper-aware of his ratty sweatpants and greasy hair and the way the apartment stinks of bleach and his laptop is still closed because he hasn't been working and his breath probably smells like beer and—

"Hi, Buck." Steve smiles like he's genuinely pleased to see him, like he doesn't give a shit about any of the things that are making Bucky panic. He looks like he's between appointments, stiff and awkward in a blazer on top of his jeans and hipster shirt with his ubiquitous portfolio tucked under his arm, and he's so bright and out of place with the drained elegance of the apartment that it feels like looking at the sun. Like he might blind Bucky if he's not careful.

"What are you doing here?" Bucky is still frozen in the doorway, like he's under a spotlight and panicking and happy all at once, his brain can't parse it all out this fast so he can't move.

"You didn't answer any of my messages and I was worried about you. I know a guy in your office and I asked him if he had more contact info. I know it's super creepy, I'm sorry, I just didn't know how to get in touch and. Yeah. I got worried." He rambles over himself awkwardly, and he doesn't say _why_ he was so worried, which is lucky because Bucky might slam the door in his face if he did.

As it is, Bucky sighs quietly and steps out of the way so Steve can come into the apartment, closing the door behind him after glancing anxiously into the hallway to make sure nobody saw him. The neighbours might not talk but the doorman will, and Bucky knows he's _fucked_ if Steve signed the book to get in. Maybe he can go down and scratch the entry out before Brock gets home, but if the doorman has been told he's unstable then that won't work, he's just going to have to wait and see if Brock checks the book and face the music if he does.

"I broke my phone, sorry." Bucky follows Steve inside, twisting his hands up in the slightly too-long sleeves of Brock's sweater and folding his arms over his chest in some subconscious attempt to defend himself. From what, he's not exactly sure. Steve isn't going to be mad at him because he couldn't face talking, he'd probably even try and tell Bucky it wasn't his fault. "I had a cold and didn't drag myself out to replace it yet. My bad."

"You had a cold for three weeks?" Steve raises his eyebrows but stops himself quickly, shaking his head. He's looking around the place curiously, trying not to seem as interested as he is. "I'm sorry, that was fucking rude. My big mouth, man. You feeling better?"

"Yeah. Yeah, better." He's already half-forgotten what he said, his brain is so scattered and panicked with Steve _right here_ in Brock's apartment with his _secrets_ everywhere. He doesn't know what to do, his mind has gone into complete shutdown. "I, um. I'm fine. So."

Steve is looking at him now, and that's actually worse than him looking at the apartment and seeing the fist-hole in the plaster where Brock lost his temper, the list of rules on the fridge to try and get Bucky through the day without fucking up, the empty beers on the counter that'll be cleaned away by the time Brock comes home. Steve putting all his critical attention onto him, taking in all the stuff he hasn't had the opportunity to hide, makes Bucky want to crawl back into bed and hide all over again.

"You look…" Steve trails off, stepping a little closer. Bucky suddenly realises that he's been leaking tears while half-asleep again, flushing red and just relieved that his face is dry now. "Have you been crying?"

"I've got a cold." Bucky sniffs unconvincingly, wiping his wrist across his face where the sleeve has already rubbed his cheeks raw and pink. "I'm fine."

"Yeah, you said that." Steve's hand twitches up for a second and then drops down, like he thought better of touching Bucky's face although he wanted to. "What happened there?"

If Bucky thought he was scared before, he had no idea what he was talking about. The question hits him like a sledgehammer because _shit shit shit_ he forgot about Sunday night. He'd got into one of his 'episodes', as Brock has started calling them since the doctor gave him legitimacy, when he woke up feeling skinless and got sicker and sicker of his life as the day went on and Brock finally did something, said something, that pushed him over the edge and made him snap.

Brock accused him of flirting with the guy who came to fit their new window blinds. Bucky screamed at him because _he wasn't he wouldn't_. Brock slapped him across the face to shut him up because he was getting hysterical enough to hurt himself.

"I, um. D'you want a cup of coffee or something?" It's the most terrible, most obvious sidestep and Bucky cringes just hearing it as he walks quickly away from Steve towards the kitchen. He can't think of a good excuse for the purple mark on his cheek and he's _humiliated_ to his core that Steve is seeing the shit he gets himself into first-hand. "Or, uh, you don't have to stick around if you're busy. I'm getting a new phone soon so I'll text you or…"

"Bucky." Steve is right behind him, and it sends a new jolt of panic down Bucky's spine. He has to stop at the kitchen counter and turns to face Steve, feeling like a chastised schoolboy who's done something wrong. The only expression on Steve's face is pain, and Bucky doesn't understand how he managed to let him down so badly without meaning to. He already lets Brock down, he can't stand to do the same to Steve.

"Buck." Steve says his name again, so calmly it feels like a cold knife between vertebrae. "What happened to your face?"

"I… I lost control. I got mad and Brock had to stop me." It's a struggle to force every word out, and the stricken look that crosses Steve's face makes it even worse. "It was an accident, I didn't mean to get mad and make him—"

"Make him? Did you hit him first?" He looks so upset, so concerned about the issue that Bucky wonders if it's possible to literally burst into flame and burn up with shame.

"I yelled. I didn't mean to get in his face when he's so stressed." Why the fuck he's talking, he doesn't know. There's something about Steve being here, right here in the inner sanctuary with him where he's most vulnerable that seems to have rendered Bucky incapable of holding up any of the walls that keep him safe. "He's going through some shit right now with his job and I should've—"

"What shit could he _possibly_ be going through at work that would justify him hitting you?" Steve cuts him off, standing there in his shoes and his uncomfortable jacket and somehow making everything in Bucky's private world look so _warped_ around him. He's pissed, he's obviously pissed in the sudden argument they've found themselves in, but somehow Bucky doesn't think it's at him. "If he hits you—"

"He doesn't fucking hit me!" Bucky's face burns with shame because someone thinking his boyfriend is a dick is one thing, but someone thinking ( _knowing_ , his brain whispers viciously) Bucky just sits back and lets him get physical when he's a _man_ totally capable of defending himself, that's just too embarrassing for him to ever, ever admit to. "It was one time. I'm _fine_."

"What about this is fine?" Steve gestures to the apartment, to the hole in the wall and the list on the fridge and the _everything_ that's just not what normal people do. Bucky knows that, he knows it deep down in his gut, but he's been pushing it away for so long that he doesn't know how to acknowledge it to himself anymore.

"It's… It's all fine, Steve. _I'm_ fine." He looks up at the ceiling and blinks hard because he can't fucking cry in front of Steve, not here and not now and not when this is probably going to be the last time they see each other because it's way too dangerous for Bucky to keep seeing him when he knows about his temper tantrums. "I'd be fucking selfish if I tried to make everything about me when he's dealing with some _actual_ problems."

"Buck, the fact you're crying in the middle of the day over this shit… that's an actual problem. Not that you're crying, but the fact your relationship is making you this upset. The fact he's hitting you, Jesus Christ." Steve isn't getting annoyed, but Bucky can tell that he's trying really, really hard to keep himself in check right now. "When we hang out, your hands shake when you give an opinion because you're not sure if I'm gonna lay you out for it. Don't pretend they don't. _That's_ a problem. I didn't wanna say anything because it's not my place, but it looks to me like you're _scared_ of your fiancé, that's a fucking _problem_."

"I… He's going through some shit. It's not his fault." Bucky feels like he might throw up if he's not careful, swallowing hard against the sickly lump of anxiety in his throat. "He's dealing with a lot of crap from his work and he's still taking care of me on top of everything. I don't have to worry about anything because he fixes it when something happens that I can't handle. What's wrong with that?"

"What happens that you can't handle? You're not stupid and you can look after yourself, Buck. You were looking after me when we were at school without anyone asking you to." Steve's not even mad, and that's what throws Bucky off track more than anything else. He's expecting yelling and belittling comments but instead he's being spoken to levelly, gently, like he's a person on an equal footing with Steve.

"That… That doesn't change the facts. I'd be an asshole if I tried to…" He's flustered, stammering over his words the way he only usually does in his mental rehearsals or his midnight re-runs of his worst, most awkward hits just to keep him awake. Bucky wants the ground to swallow him up because he feels so _bad_ , like he's rotten and rusted right down to the core and he doesn't know how to keep it hidden when Steve is shining such a bright light on him. "I'd just be an attention whore. He's dealing with _real_ shit—"

"You said that already." Steve cuts him off, not patronising but clearly, so clearly concerned. And watching Bucky with that spark of determination that says he's thinking about carrying him out over his shoulder if Bucky doesn't listen to what he's saying soon. Part of Bucky breaks off from his main self and wonders what it would be like if Steve did carry him off like some kind of saving fireman. Would he be happier? Would he be _happy_? "What else?"

"He… He takes care…" Bucky trails off when he realises he's said that before too. There's a painful static building behind his ears, threatening to deafen him because he's doing something _wrong_ but a large part of him wants to say _fuck it_ and go further. "If I tried to get attention for myself right now I'd be the most selfish person."

"You're supposed to get attention in a relationship, it's kind of a two-way—"

"Brock does _everything_ for me and all he asks is that I don't be a fucking dick, which is apparently hard for me because I'm a waste of fucking oxygen sometimes. He doesn't need to hear about my bullshit when I don't need to talk about it."

"You don't need to like you don't _need_ to? Or you don't need to like you can drink enough to shut your mouth and put you to sleep every night?" Steve is still so infuriatingly calm as he gestures to the beer bottles on the counter, that stillness that suggests he's thrumming with energy under the surface but he's so focused that it's not running away from him and getting sloppy like Bucky always does. "Because only one of those is not a problem, Buck. And I'm pretty sure it's not the one you're doing."

"It's not a problem! I'm fine!" Bucky doesn't want to get defensive, he really doesn't, but it's as if it's not him who gets twitchy and fires back when Steve gets too damn close to making his carefully-hewn exterior crack open. There's part of him that wants to be cracked open, but a much larger part that screams _no what if what if_ and holds him fast in place like a straitjacket.

"People in a relationship generally give a shit if the person they're dating feels like a waste of oxygen. They _generally_ want to help them feel better, not make them shut up and stop bothering them."

"How the fuck do you know?! You don't even know him!" Bucky busts out, kicking like a cornered animal's last defence. "Nobody's perfect. How the fuck is he supposed to be perfect?"

"He doesn't have to be perfect, he needs to be _better_. If this is what he's making you think of yourself then you deserve better." Steve sounds so sure that Bucky wants to punch him and run away because his whole being just can't accept what he's saying. "No, I don't know him, but you don't deserve to be sad, Buck. Not like this. Not because of someone who's supposed to love you."

"He does love me." There are tears in his eyes now, and Steve is still calm against his loss of control and Bucky wonders wildly, irrationally, if Steve will backhand him across the face too if he starts yelling. Part of him wants to push, part of him wants to find out exactly what Brock is doing that a decent man like Steve wouldn't do.

Brock is a decent man. Brock is a good man. He's marrying Brock. He doesn't think about Brock forcing pills down his throat and he doesn't expect Brock to drag him out of bed and he doesn't fear Brock's temper. Brock loves him. That's what Bucky keeps telling himself. That's the truth.

At one time, the Earth being flat was true. That's what a strange, quiet part of his brain thinks in the midst of the chaos and breakdown. Truth changes depending on information, and Steve might have just blown his neat theory of the world wide open. It's terrifying, horrifying, and Bucky is genuinely so scared he doesn't want to breathe anymore if he has to keep feeling like this.

"If he loves you, then why did you have to lie about us being friends? Why did I have to track you down like a damn stalker just to come in here and have your doorman tell me you're not _allowed_ out of the building? The door is right there, Buck." Steve gestures to the door with a vicious sweep of his arm and Bucky's grateful he doesn't flinch. "Grab some stuff and we can go right now."

"I can't. I've got—"

"Why? Why can't you? If he loves you, he won't be mad about you going for coffee with your friend for an hour." Steve sounds frustrated, annoyed with him, and Bucky shrinks back involuntarily. The tiny movement makes Steve's face twist, and he suddenly backs off and stills his gesturing, somehow making himself smaller as he speaks more quietly again. He only got close to losing his temper for a second and it's enough to make Bucky totally shut down. "Bucky, he's not here. There's nothing stopping you walking out that door."

"He needs me."

"Even if he needs you, he's not treating you right." Steve looks like he's holding so much back that he's practically choking on it, and Bucky knows how he feels as he grits his teeth and finally forces the words out. "Nothing is more important than you being safe and happy, okay? Nothing. And if he doesn't see that, then he doesn't fucking deserve you."

"I need him." Bucky folds his arms again, arms wrapped around his middle defensively and looking for all the world like he believes the bullshit coming out of his mouth. A detached part of himself watches from somewhere above the fridge (Canadian, special-order with a wine rack because they used to have friends and throw parties) and shakes his head at how unconvincing he sounds, cracking under only a little scrutiny. How close to the edge has he been? "I dunno what I'd do without him."

"Bucky—"

"Just go." He won't look at Steve now, won't raise his head or take his eyes off his socked feet that are curled over each other like every part of him is trying to fold in on itself and hide. "I didn't ask you to come here."

"I was worried about you. I'm still worried about you." Steve doesn't come closer, doesn't try and invade Bucky's personal space, but his voice doesn't waver or raise again in anger and Bucky slowly, cautiously looks at him again now the argument sounds like it's defused. Like things sound safe again. "Just think about it, okay? You deserve better than this."

"Go away, Steve." Bucky's voice is barely a whisper, words forced out because he really, really doesn't want Steve to go and leave him alone here but he needs this conversation to end. It feels like betrayal, it feels like Brock is going to find out that he's been making him look bad and…

But Bucky hasn't lied. He doesn't think he's lied. Does that mean he's the one making Brock look bad, or is Brock doing that on his own?

Betrayal makes his head hurt.

"Call me, okay? Any time you need me, I don't care what time it is." Steve looks honestly scared, and Bucky's heart drops into his stomach when he catches sight of the clock on the kitchen wall. Brock said he'd be late but it's nearing his usual time home, he needs Steve to get out of here before he catches hell for this and makes it all worse. "Please Buck, promise you'll call if you need anything."

"I will. I'll call." Bucky keeps his eyes on the floor again as he brushes past Steve and opens the apartment door, half-hiding behind it like it'll protect him from this day. "Just go."

Steve looks like it goes against every fibre of his being to walk out of the apartment now he has some idea of what's going on, why he hasn't been able to see Bucky and why his friend has being behaving so weirdly, but he leaves reluctantly when Bucky insists. He probably realises that being here isn't going to make anything better when Brock comes home, at least Bucky hopes he gets that. If Steve wants him to be safe, he needs to let Bucky handle Brock on his own.

He promises Steve one more time that he'll call and then shuts the door hurriedly behind him, sliding to the floor and curling into himself with his head on his knees. This is his worst nightmare coming true, and he can't deny it because Steve didn't lie. Steve told the truth about everything he saw and Bucky can't bury his head back in the sand once it's been dug out.

He needs to start dinner. He needs to _try harder_. But all he can do for the moment is sit there on the floor and try to pretend the knees of his sweatpants aren't getting damper and damper from tears.

 

Sam's is quiet in the evenings, the mom crowd having filtered out for early bedtimes and the dog-walkers less inclined to stop for caffeine this late. It's calm and gently lit and the perfect place to recover from having your world turned upside-down.

Bucky is alone in his usual back corner, trying to type out an email to his boss and erasing more than he types because his hands are shaking so hard he's making mistakes every third letter. Brock has told him he should resign, says he's worried about how unstable Bucky's been since he started getting treatment. He had to hold Bucky down tonight, push him to the bathroom floor and restrain him because Bucky lost his temper again and started yelling, started causing a scene and saying things that weren't true because someone poisoned his mind.

He'd been distraught after Steve left, shaken up and reeling and had broken into the drinks cabinet again to try and get himself calm before his fiancé came home. Not one of his smarter ideas, but then nothing he does lately feels particularly smart in the face of how stupid he always seems to act when Brock is around. Especially tonight. He'd managed to club together dinner and waver his way through being quiet and obedient until he was washing dishes and Brock asked him about his _visitor_ today.

He checked the door book. Steve wasn't lying when he told Bucky the doorman said he wasn't allowed to leave the building. Brock had people watching him and checked up on Bucky to make sure he was behaving, while at the same time lying to his face about why the hell he was late home for no good reason.

 _"Steve wouldn't treat me like this!"_ he heard himself yelling as if he was sitting somewhere above the shower stall, trying to get away from Brock and hide in the bathroom when his eyes flashed with anger, watching the movie of his fuck-up unfold in front of him. The next thing he knew he was on his back, staring up at the ceiling with Brock's hand around his throat.

A little voice in the back of his head said _I told you so_.

 _"Are you fucking him?"_ Brock had been an inch from his face, spit flecking hot on Bucky's cheek as he gasped and choked for air. _"You'd better not be. You'd better not even think about it. You're mine!"_

His neck is throbbing and bruised from the pressure, and Bucky keeps nervously adjusting his scarf because it doesn't _quite_ cover the blooming purple enough to make him comfortable. He'd insisted to Steve over and over that Brock didn't hit him. Does choking him count? He was just restraining him.

He was just, he was just –

"Hi." The soft voice makes him jump, and Bucky looks up to see a very petite woman with waist-length braids standing beside his table. She's well-dressed and smiling at him gently, completely unthreatening to the extent that he feels bad for flinching.

"Uh, hi." His voice is rougher than he'd expected, and he swallows hard in embarrassment and twitches his scarf anxiously again. Brock had left the apartment after he'd chewed Bucky out for pissing him off for twenty minutes, so Bucky had figured it was better to go somewhere he felt safe than sit in the house stewing. At least, he'd thought so until someone tried to talk to him.

"Sweetheart, he's only gonna do it again. Men like that don't change." The woman presses a card into his hand, small fingers gentle on his palm that's still bruised from breaking his fall on the bathroom floor.

Bucky feels cold all the way down to his toes, like he fell off the edge of a cliff, and he looks down at the card in embarrassment. There are only a few other people in the coffee shop, it's near closing, and soon he'll have nowhere to go but home. But sleeping next to Brock and hoping tomorrow will be better.

He's getting tired of hoping. He's getting so tired.

"If you want to talk to somebody, they can help you." The woman sounds like she's a long way away, some accent that Bucky can't place and something soft in her voice. Not pity, maybe understanding. Maybe he's not totally pathetic to be scared to go home. "I wish I could do something else. But they're good people and they'll help you get out, if you're ready."

"Thank you. But… b-but it's okay." Bucky stares at the card trembling in his hand and looks up, meeting the woman's kind, dark eyes with a tentative confidence he hasn't felt for a long time.

He's fucking terrified, so terrified he can hardly breathe, but Steve reminded him what it's like to not feel scared all the time. He doesn't want that anymore.

He wants out.

"I… I've got someone to call."


	4. one small step, one giant leap

_Can I have a moment?_  
_Before I go?_  
_'Cause I've been by myself all night long_  
_Hoping you're someone I used to know_

 

There's a stack of notebooks in the back of Bucky and Brock's shared closet space.

They're battered old things that Bucky used to write stories in until the pages were saturated with ink, torn from late-night frustration or pressed into hard with the enthusiasm of the right word or hesitant sentences in pencil now fading away with age. They go all the way back to when he first moved out of his parents' house after college, straight in with his boyfriend. Brock has been trying to get him to throw the books out for years, since Bucky's writing dried up altogether and he stopped adding to the pile, but he usually forgets they're sitting there in the back of the built-in closet, collecting dust.

If he looked closely, more than glanced at them in passing, he might notice that the books are a lot less dusty than they used to be. And that the stack has become more box-like, split up into more columns and giving the appearance of there being a lot more books there than there really are. If he noticed all that, got suspicious, and decided to move the books himself, then Bucky might have been in serious trouble.

As it is, Brock never noticed the stack of books changing. He never got suspicious about that because he was too busy wondering if Bucky was cheating with every guy he came into contact with. He never found the secret, tiniest spark of defiance that refused to be stamped out.

He never found Bucky's bug-out bag.

That's how Bucky's come to think of it, anyway, like it's something to be saved for the apocalypse. It had come into being shortly after the first time Brock lost his temper badly enough to shove his boyfriend into the wall and crack his head against the brick with the force. They'd been in the middle of a blazing row, probably about Bucky flirting with some guy at his boyfriend's birthday party (the accusation would come up again and again over the years, but Bucky stubbornly maintains that it didn't happen even in the face of all Brock's ugliest jealous anger), and the sudden force had brought their yelling to an abrupt halt. Bucky had picked himself up, told Brock to fuck himself, and stormed into the bedroom. He'd thrown a few things into an old backpack and left the apartment, Brock hot on his heels telling him to _fucking leave then see how long you make it on your own you crazy fucking –_

Bucky got halfway to the nearest subway station before he'd stopped in his tracks, frozen to the sidewalk as he realised he had nowhere to go. It wasn't like he could just show up at his parents' place and prove them right, let them think he was some stupid kid and every crappy thing they'd tried to convince him about Brock was true. He didn't even know where his sister was crashing before she left to look at colleges, and his texts at that moment went unanswered. For the first time, Bucky realised that he was totally, utterly alone.

He'd ended up sitting in the window of Sam's Place, nursing a cold coffee and trying not to let his increasing feeling of dread show as the evening wore on and the place emptied out around him. He'd been through his phone over and over, the small number of contacts yielding nobody he knew well enough to crash with without an explanation. His friends had slowly faded out of his life since he moved in with Brock, and when it came to the point he needed someone he realised he no longer had anyone to call.

"Hey man, we're closing." Sam had obviously been trying to avoid kicking him out for a while now, but the inevitable time had been reached. Bucky must have been worse at hiding his feelings than he thought, because concern had flashed across Sam's face clear as day as soon as they made eye contact. "You okay? You got somewhere to go, or—"

That's when Brock had walked into the café like a threatening force and knight in shining armour at the same time, ignoring the _closed_ sign in favour of getting to Bucky. The panic splashed gaudily across his face had sent a stab of guilt through his boyfriend, shutting his mouth where he'd been about to reply to Sam's question.

"Jesus, you scared the shit outta me. Couldn't find you anywhere, I've been looking all over." Brock had grabbed his bag off the back of his chair, pulling Bucky up with it by the elbow. "C'mon, we're going home."

Bucky hadn't resisted. He never found out if that's what made Sam intervene.

"Hey." Sam had stepped between them, creating a physical barrier because his mother didn't raise a fool and he didn't like what he was seeing. He'd looked at Bucky only, like he was confident he could handle anything Brock might throw at him without even a glance. "Are you okay? You don't have to go with him if you don't want to."

"Excuse me? What's your fucking problem? This is none of your business, buddy." Brock had bristled immediately, squaring up like he was about to lose his temper again, and Bucky couldn't take it, could just see everything unfolding in front of him like a nightmare.

Brock getting into a fight. The cops being called. The whole world watching and knowing that this massive, embarrassing scene was Bucky's fault because he'd stormed away from a fight like a petulant child. He couldn't let that play out, he couldn't handle the humiliation over one stupid argument that had been his fault in the first place.

"I'm fine. It's fine. He's my boyfriend. Sorry." He hadn't met Sam's eyes as he apologised, walking around him quickly to follow a fuming Brock out of the warmth of the café and into the cold autumn darkness of the street. He wouldn't go back there for a month, in the end. Too ashamed.

All the way home, Bucky had been terrified that Sam's intervention would be the nail in his coffin, that the fight would start up all over again and they'd end up right back where they'd been when he left the apartment. Or worse. He'd fantasised about turning back, wondered how things would go if he _did_ let the humiliating scene play out. Tried to imagine a life without Brock and, for the first time, came up totally empty. He didn't have anyone to call, after all.

At the door to their building he'd still almost done it, for one crazy second he'd still almost left. But then the thought of sleeping on the subway because he had nowhere else to go floated across his mind and Bucky had followed his boyfriend meekly to the elevator under the judgemental eyes of the doorman.

As soon as they reached the apartment, all Bucky's fears had suddenly crossed the line into guilty paranoid fantasy. Brock had broken down, actually cried and held his boyfriend because he'd been so afraid that Bucky was gone for good. So afraid that he'd driven him off, lost him by being an asshole just because the thought of Bucky leaving him for another guy made him upset enough to lose his mind for a minute. He'd apologised over and over, made Bucky feel like the worst person in the world for storming off without giving Brock the chance to say sorry. Bucky had overreacted and look at all the trouble he'd caused.

He'd ended up being the one apologising. Brock forgave him immediately, because he was a better man than Bucky back then.

The next few days had been like the first year of their relationship all over again. Brock had been considerate and sweet, brought Bucky coffee in bed and surprised him with flowers at his office (he'd been allowed to work outside of the house back then). They'd made love slowly again, lingering over each other and relearning familiar bodies like they were new to each other, like they were starting over. It had been perfect, and Bucky's guilt had only burrowed deeper under his skin until it took hold like a parasite.

The backpack holding those few panic-grabbed essentials had been shoved into the back of the closet, a physical reminder of Bucky's shame that he couldn't bear to look at. But for some reason, because of some smothered seed of doubt in the back of his mind, he'd never unpacked it. It sat there like a passport stamp, something indelible that signified a border had been crossed. Like it was something that couldn't be undone, couldn't just be put away again like nothing ever happened.

Over the years, Bucky took it out from time to time. Sometimes he took things out and put them in their right places when Brock was being sweet, other times added things with unsteady fingers after they had another fight and he was afraid to walk around the apartment in case he fucked up again. It sat there like a talisman, an idea that refused to die no matter how hard one or both of them tried to kill it: _you can leave_.

When Bucky picks it up tonight, still cold and wearing his scarf from the walk home from Sam's (relieved to find Brock is still gone after his usual storming out to the bar act), the bag is a lot heavier than it was back on that first night in the murky, half-good past. He has some practical essentials in there (passport, hard drive, cash he's slowly accumulated so there wouldn't be any big withdrawals to attract attention), plus some sentimental things he thought Brock might destroy out of spite if he left (his childhood teddy bear being the main one, because Brock had threatened to throw it out even when things were going well, one thing he could never tolerate was weakness). Bucky looks through the contents with fresh eyes tonight, metal-mouthed with adrenaline because it's not just idle fantasy this time.

This is the real world and he's really going to be all alone, be without whatever he leaves out of this one bag. He's not daydreaming anymore.

He's absolutely fucking terrified.

 

Steve is asleep on his desk when the phone rings.

He'd buried himself in work when he got back from Bucky's apartment, after ranting extensively about the encounter to (more accurately _at_ ) his roommate. Clint had been innocently eating cereal in his underpants in front of the TV, only to have the entire force of Steve's righteous fury unloaded on him by virtue of being the nearest conscious being. Steve is a ranter, he can't help that part of his nature. He's not entirely capable of holding himself back, especially when he's passionate about something. And he's not more passionate about a lot of things lately than Bucky Barnes.

At first Clint had clearly assumed it was another 'the guy I'm clearly in love with is dating someone else surprise surprise that really grinds my gears' rant, but things took a more sinister turn as he actually listened to Steve's description of the apartment.

"There's a fist hole right there in the fucking wall." Steve gestures expansively because he'd dearly like to have made a few of his own. "And there was this fucking list on the fridge. I didn't get a chance to actually read it all, but it was weird. All stuff about which food goes in what cupboard and how to clean the fucking bathroom. Like he's a kid watching the place or a maid or something."

"That's kinda fucked up." Clint agrees, setting aside his soggy cereal as he loses interest in eating it while at optimum milk saturation in favour of stopping Steve giving himself a hernia over this. "Still, it's not—"

"He's got a big fucking bruise on his cheek. He'd obviously been crying. He was drinking in the middle of the day." Steve rattles off his evidence with increasing impatience. "Don't tell me I'm overreacting, because that's not nothing."

"Yeah, it's not. That's a lot of red flags. The bruise definitely isn't a good sign after how the boyfriend acted when you saw him." Clint frowns. "If I came across him at work, I'd be concerned."

"The door guy told me he wasn't allowed out of the building for his own safety. I had to pretend I was delivering work stuff just to see him." Steve can't even slump down on the shabby couch in frustration, he's far too angry for that. "I feel like I should be calling the cops or something."

"Spectacularly bad idea. Like, me three beers deep level bad." Clint shakes his head seriously, and the assessment actually manages to slow his friend's roll somewhat.

Steve is always slightly surprised by the way Clint's personality shifts when he goes into professional mode, from car-crash human to completely competent. Like the time some guy got a bottle broken over his head in their local bar and Clint went from demanding tequila to stopping the bleeding in less than thirty seconds. He's a very good person to have around in a crisis, which Steve is now pretty much certain this is.

"Calling the cops is just gonna provoke the boyfriend, if you're right about this. Because if Bucky wouldn't talk to you then he's definitely not gonna talk to a uniform he doesn't even know. And there's no way the boyfriend isn't gonna find out the cops were over if he's really keeping tabs on him." He taps his thumb against his teeth thoughtfully, mulling it over in spite of Steve's agitated need to do something _now_. "Let me talk to Nat about it, she had some customer she thought was in a similar situation that I think she talked to. She might have some ideas about how to get through to him."

"So what am I supposed to do, just leave him there when he's obviously fucking miserable and his boyfriend beats him—"

"Did he admit it? That the boyfriend beats him?" Clint cuts off the rant building up again with interest.

"No." Steve deflates, just the tiniest bit. "He denied everything and said it was all his fault."

"Shit." There's frustration creeping into Clint's voice now, and Steve actually feels somewhat vindicated that he's not the only one angry about this. Bucky doesn't seem to have many people on his side, and Clint is a pretty great one to get. "He's not gonna appreciate someone checking up on him, then. He's probably embarrassed."

"How the fuck can he…" Steve trails off with a groan, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes as he starts pacing across the well-trodden floorboards because he's so frustrated he has to move. "I know the guy, I talked to him every day until he went off the radar. He's smart, I don't get how he can be manipulated like this. Brock's totally got inside his head and made him think he can't take fucking care of himself. He told me he can't handle himself, and that's just not true."

"The boyfriend is obviously controlling, but there might also be other stuff going on that you don't know about." He holds his hands up in a _don't shoot the messenger_ gesture when Steve turns sharply on his heel to look at him. He usually has to move when he's angry, but this time Clint's genuinely concerned he might take a swing at something. "I'm just saying. This is the kinda shit that'd be real easy for the boyfriend to argue, which is why you can't call the cops. If Bucky doesn't disclose then you have no evidence and you'd just be putting him at risk."

"So what, I just sit here with my thumb up my ass waiting for the asshole to kill him so there's _proof_?" He's so full of rage he's almost in tears, and while it's impossible to be friends with Steve and not see him infuriated on a regular basis, this is a rarer anger. This is the kind of fury that fuels lifting impossible weight off the loved one trapped beneath it, and it's bottled up with nowhere to go. "I just got him back, I can't lose him again."

"Man, I know it sucks. But there's not much you can realistically do without putting him in more danger." This is delivered in Clint's level 'triage' voice, but it doesn't do a damn thing to placate Steve. "Stay in contact. Let him know you're here for him and ready to listen if he wants to talk. I'll see what I can find out that might help and we can go from there."

"That's not—"

"Go draw." Clint points at the worn wooden stairs that lead up to Steve's bedroom with a shocking amount of authority for someone who managed to break their last TV set with a bow, an arrow, and a questionable pastrami bagel. "Or go to the gym and punch something, whatever you've gotta do. But you need to burn off the energy and come back to this with a clear head, because you're not gonna be making any good decisions right now."

"I can't just—"

"You can, and you will. And I'll talk to some people at work tonight about what we can do, and then we'll make a plan. When you're thinking rationally and not looking for permission to charge in all guns blazing."

"When the fuck did you get so reasonable?" Steve grumbles, flexing his hands in and out of fists compulsively because he knows Clint is right but that doesn't stop him wishing he had an excuse to break Brock's entire face right now. Or go drag Bucky kicking and screaming out of the apartment if that's what it takes to get him to safety. Anything.

"Contrary to most of the evidence, I do know what I'm doing. Sometimes." He points at the stairs again, because he knows how Steve operates by now and distraction isn't one of his strong points. "Go do a thing. Stop thinking about this for an hour or two."

He hates it when Clint's right, not that that's why he stomps up the stairs like a moody teenager.

He'd do anything to get Bucky safe right now, and all he can do is nothing.

By the time midnight rolls around, Steve had been drawing for a few hours straight before knocking out right on top of the comic book page he'd been working on. The sketched-out panels feature a muzzled, forcibly silenced character he'd dragged together out of the blue and is choosing not to analyse too deeply in case he doesn't like what comes up. A sheet of paper sticks to his face when he sits up, disoriented and dragged awake by the loud buzzing of his phone where he'd left it right next to his head.

He checks the caller ID and has never gone from dead asleep to fully alert so fast in his life.

"Buck?" He picks up quickly, voice rough from sleep until he clears his throat (and yanks the paper off his face at the same time). The rest of the apartment is dark beyond his desk lamp, Clint must already have left for work. "You okay?"

"Yeah. I'm okay." Bucky sounds pretty rough himself, voice quiet and scratchy like he's coming down with something. "Sorry I woke you up."

"It's fine, I told you to call whenever." The thwarted adrenaline of inaction has started trickling through his system again, and it's all Steve can do to not start begging Bucky to see sense and get the hell out of there. "What's wrong?"

"I, uh." There's a pause and the sound of a door closing before he speaks again. "We had a fight. I… I'm leaving."

He says it almost like a question, like he was sure a little while ago but now he's second-guessing himself and doubting his decision. Steve sits up straighter in his chair with surprise, sore back popping from sleeping in a weird position, because something serious must have happened to change Bucky's mind after the way he'd been acting that afternoon.

"Where are you?"

"In the apartment." Bucky answers that more easily, because facts are always less of a struggle than deciding how to feel. Steve remembers him saying something to that effect in high school, he doesn't recall the context, and part of him wonders if Bucky has been primed for someone like Brock to slide their claws into ever since then.

"Is he there?" He's aware of just how easily Brock could probably talk Bucky into changing his mind right now and the thought chills him to the bone. 

"No, but—"

"I'll come get you."

Steve cuts him off in the haste of his relief, standing up so fast he gives himself head rush and his vision greys out for a second. Which isn't about to stop him moving heaven and earth to get to Bucky if he needs to.

"I can be there in—"

"No. Tomorrow. I need time. I'll leave when he's at work." Bucky cuts him off quickly, nervous and rushing his words like he doesn't know how long he's going to be alone for. "Meet me at Sam's? I'll be there after ten."

"Why can't you leave now? Buck?" There's silence on the other end, too long for a natural pause, until Steve hears the sound of a heavier door closing. "Bucky?"

"I'll be fine, he never does it twice in a row." He's whispering hurriedly now, and Steve is sure to his sick stomach that Brock just got home. The lurch of fear makes him dizzy, he can't imagine what Bucky must feel like right now.

"Buck, why don't you—"

"Sam's tomorrow. Don't call me. Please."

"I'll be there." Steve promises, wanting nothing more than to go over there and drag Bucky out and never let him go. "Stay safe, Buck. Please stay safe."

There's no answer but the beep of the call ending, clinical like a flatline, and it takes every ounce of self-control Steve has in him not to throw his phone across the room. It's only the knowledge that Bucky might need to call him again that stops him shattering the damn thing into a thousand useless pieces.

It's a good thing his gym is open twenty-four hours, because he's got a date with a punch bag and the memory of Brock's smug face to keep him sane until the morning. If Bucky doesn't show up to Sam's tomorrow then Steve is going after him, fuck whatever Clint says. He'd rather get arrested than let the man he cares about (don't think love, because he doesn't love you back) end up dead.

Bucky's never going to get hurt again, not on Steve's watch.

 

"You scare me."

Bucky murmurs into the words quietly into Brock's shoulder, hugged possessively into his side like a favourite toy at bedtime. He'd managed to hang up on Steve and hide his phone fast enough that Brock didn't notice anything untoward was going on. Predictably, so predictably now, his fiancé had taken Bucky gently into his arms and kissed the bruises on his throat when he found him in the bedroom, told him how worried he was when the doorman said Bucky had been out.

 _"Anything could've happened to you and it would've been my fault."_ He'd stroked Bucky's hair and snuggled into him and it would've been so easy to believe the soothing words if the fear in Steve's voice when Bucky said he was staying overnight wasn't still fresh in his mind. _"Don't scare me like that again."_

Bucky realises he's not the one doing the scaring now. He thinks, anyway. It's easier to doubt himself the longer he's here in a warm embrace that doesn't hurt. Brock had been so sweet to him when he came home, smelling like booze but not angrily drunk or seeming anything worse than apologetic and concerned about his boyfriend. The image of Brock's face in lamplight, leaning down to kiss Bucky tenderly as he pushed inside him slow and loving and so careful not to hurt him after he said sorry a hundred times and moved Bucky gently to the bed, is something he burns into his mind's eye to keep forever.

If it weren't for the bruises throbbing around his throat, he could've believed the gentle, loving Brock was the real deal. But there's fear and lying now, and the milestone hiding heavy in the closet means they can't go back. Bucky can't pretend anymore, no matter how badly he wishes he could. This isn't make-believe, and his daydreams have finally deserted him.

"You scare me and I… I have to go. I don't want to. But I don't know if you're gonna do something worse next time, and I don't want to die."

He freezes as Brock sighs and shifts slightly in his sleep, heart pounding loud in his ears as his fiancé settles down without the slightest gesture towards waking up. Bucky buries his face tighter into firm muscle, breathing Brock in and feeling the familiar skin against his cheek for what might be the last time. He blinks hard and looks up at the dark ceiling, one hot tear slipping out to dampen the hair at his temple. There's so much beauty to find in the brokenness here but it's not enough anymore. It's not _enough_ to die for.

"I love you." He whispers, almost inaudible in the silent secrecy of their bedroom. This used to be a sanctuary, used to be his favourite place in the entire world before it turned into somewhere he dreaded, something he feared. "I love you so much I can't breathe sometimes, but I'm scared you're gonna kill me even if I don't rot away. I remember what you were like before, you wouldn't want me to die here."

Nothing answers him but the quiet whistling of Brock's broken-nosed breathing before he begins to snore. Back in the early days of their relationship, when Bucky was having problems with his family accepting them, if he felt shitty and upset at night then he'd wake his boyfriend up, either on purpose because he couldn't handle the silence alone or by accident because he'd never learned to be a silent crier until after Brock started getting irritated at every slight display of weakness inside their walls.

He used to wake Brock up when he needed him, and even half asleep and bone tired his boyfriend would make coffee or pour a drink and take Bucky into his arms, listening to him pour his heart out as much as he needed to. They'd watch the sun rise and the light change outside their window sometimes, and Bucky would apologise a thousand times but Brock would just shush him or quiet his _sorry_ with a kiss, because he loved him and he wasn't okay if Bucky wasn't okay, no matter how tired that left him the next day.

The last time he woke Brock up by accident, Bucky had been left cleaning up a broken bottle and sleeping on the couch when Brock locked him out of the bedroom because he had a meeting in the morning and no time for Bucky's nonsense.

Bucky's tired of being a nonsense. He's just so tired of it all.

"I'm sorry." He nuzzles further into Brock, wrapping around him like an octopus and another tear escaping him as Brock unconsciously squeezes him back. This is the body he loved and that loved him back, this is the body he thought he'd spend the rest of his life beside, and this is the body he might never hold again. He can feel his heart rending in two with every breath he takes and there's nothing cleansing or noble about it. Only grief. "I'm so sorry."

With a soft sniffle, Bucky settles himself against Brock's chest and stares at the closet door across the darkened room. Tomorrow he'll get up and be the perfect fiancé for the last time, make Brock coffee and take his pills obediently under supervision and kiss him goodbye with love, all the real love he has left. Then Bucky will open that dark closet he's staring at, take out the bag that holds his life, and walk away.

He closes his eyes and concentrates on memorising Brock's skin against his cheek. He only has to pretend one more time.

Finales are always the best performance, he's counting on that.  

 

Sam's is in the mid-morning lull when Steve arrives, not even trying to disguise the fact he's practically run here from his last client. He's overtired from not sleeping at all last night and out of breath from the lengthy half-jog, and he heads straight for Sam without even caring that he's cutting the line for once.

"Back corner." Sam informs him as soon as he sees the desperate look on Steve's face, speaking lowly as he hands a woman wrangling twin toddlers her bag of muffins. "He's got friends."

The first thing that occurs to Steve when he navigates his way through the usual crush to the back corner is that Bucky looks _wrecked_. His hair is lying flat and greasy and his face is puffy and pale like he hasn't slept before or after Steve saw him yesterday. Everything about his posture screams that he's barely keeping himself awake, slumped shoulders and curved spine broadcasting tiredness from every angle. He's sitting with a group of women and little kids, a chunky baby plonked on his lap to mind. The kid keeps pulling on the scarf wrapped around Bucky's neck, revealing a ring of dark bruises every time it slips down before Bucky tugs it nervously back into place again.

The women around him look up when Steve approaches, and he's hit with the distinct memory of watching a documentary at school about lionesses defending their pack. It actually settles his stomach just a tiny bit, because these are people clearly very much in Bucky's corner when he needs them. Bucky is the last to look up at him, and relief washes over his expression as he hands off the baby and gets to his feet.

The bruises are worse up close.

"Bucky, oh god." Steve can't hold back this time, wraps his arms around his friend and holds him tight like he never wants to let him go. Bucky is slower to respond, more tentative, but he eventually snakes his arms around Steve's waist and holds on just as tight. "Your neck, what the hell did he do to you?"

"Nothing." Bucky pulls one hand away to adjust his scarf again, too wrapped up for the warmth of the coffee shop in the knitted wool on top of the thick hoodie he's wearing. He sounds flat and distant, spaced out like he's half-asleep or daydreaming. "I'm fine. Told you I would be."

"You brought your stuff, right?" Steve doesn't even care that they're still hugging in the middle of the café, feeling Bucky's nod against his shoulder gratefully. There's one worn black backpack hanging off the back of the chair Bucky had occupied, is that everything he has? "Did you get past the door guy okay?"

"Climbed down the fire escape." Bucky is the one who pulls out of the embrace, stuffing his hands nervously in his pockets like he's cold, which he can't possibly be in all his layers. His whole demeanour is setting off so many alarm bells in Steve's head, but he can only put out one fire at a time and right now his priority has to be getting Bucky as far away from his boyfriend as possible.

"I, um. I'm sorry about yesterday." Bucky says, so quietly that Steve barely hears it with his face turned to the floor the way it is. "I guess I'm stupid."

"You're not stupid, Buck." The desire to kiss the sad look off his face is almost overwhelming, but Steve gets a grip on himself because he's pretty sure that the only thing he could do that would be more destructive right now would be to punch Bucky in the face. "You don't have to be sorry about yesterday, all I give a shit about is that you're here now."

Bucky nods like he doesn't believe it, like he still has something to atone for and Steve is just trying to lull him into a false sense of security and make him fuck up. Maybe he really thinks that's the case, Steve doesn't know what kind of shit Brock has been twisting into Bucky's head. He gets the feeling it's going to be a while before Bucky starts taking anything anyone says to him at face value.

He'd talked to Clint last night, when he got in from his shift at around two in the morning with takeout pizza for two because he somehow predicted that Steve wouldn't be asleep. They'd sketched out a plan: that Steve could bring Bucky to stay with them for a while if Bucky would come, but that he had to be extremely cautious about the whole _being madly in love with him_ thing.

 _"Otherwise he's just gonna take all his expectations about the boyfriend and project them onto you. You're gonna end up being the one he's desperate not to piss off."_ Clint had reasoned, chewing through a mouthful of double cheese obnoxiously. _"Whatever you do, don't tell him how you feel. Don't kiss him, don't fuck him, give him some space and let him figure out who the fuck he is and how he feels about himself before you start making him have feelings about anything else."_

Which was pretty sound logic, especially coming from Clint, but seeing Bucky standing in front of him looking completely lost makes Steve realise just how hard it's going to be to keep his feelings in check.

"We should get going." He squeezes Bucky's arm, forcing himself to pull away again without crowding him. "Get you back to my place so you can get some rest, you look exhausted."

"Not gonna argue." Bucky twitches something that's definitely not close enough to a smile and shifts his weight slightly, glancing back to where he'd been sitting before looking to Steve like he's asking for permission. "I just gotta say goodbye. Might have to stay away from here for a while."

"Sure man, no rush." The gratitude that crosses Bucky's face, the relief that he's allowed to say goodbye to his friends, turns Steve's stomach. He bites down on his reaction, on the urge to tell Bucky he doesn't have to _ask_ Steve if he can do anything, because he knows that's not going to help anything right now.

A body close to his shoulder pulls him out of his head as he watches Bucky go to collect his sad little rucksack, and Steve turns to see Sam standing stony-faced behind him.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" He has someone covering for him at the counter so he's free to pull Steve far enough away from the group that he's out of Bucky's earshot, lowering his voice all the same because this isn't something to broadcast. "Your boy's not in good shape."

"I can see that." Steve's mouth twists unhappily as he glances back at Bucky, currently being hugged fiercely by a tiny black woman with waist-length braids. "I don't think he's slept."

"I mean he ran out the door once already and one of his mom friends had to talk him back in." Sam explains, fixing Steve with the kind of stern look he hasn't seen since before they were friends. "He's _barely_ keeping it together. If you're not careful he's gonna go straight back home, and I don't think you're gonna get another chance to get him outta there after the way he turned up this morning."

"I'll keep an eye on him." Steve promises, just as serious and slightly taken aback. He hadn't expected that Bucky might still be seriously conflicted about leaving Brock once he'd made up his mind to go. Maybe there are a lot of naïve assumptions he's going to have to rethink in the next few weeks. "I'm gonna see if I can get him to contact his folks. I think he said they live out in New England now, it'd be far enough that he'd have time to think about it if he decided to go back."

"Just be careful. I dunno where his mind is at but it doesn't seem good." A piece of croissant hits Sam in the back of the head and he turns to see Peggy gesturing at him impatiently from behind the counter as business starts picking up for the nearing lunch rush. "Okay, I gotta go. I'll let you know if creepy boyfriend shows up looking for him."

"Thanks, man. I'll text you later." They hug quickly before Sam goes back to work, ducking a couple more pastry projectiles as he goes.

Bucky is standing with his backpack over one shoulder, ready to leave when Steve comes back to him. He says a final goodbye to the group of moms he's been sitting with (Steve just thanks his stars he gets away without a shovel talk or two, because there are definitely at least a couple of ladies there who look like they'd do him some damage if they thought he was a threat to their friend) and then lets Steve lead him out of the café. He only hesitates when they get to the street, grabbing Steve's hand in such a sudden motion that Steve's worried he's seen Brock or something.

"You okay?" He looks at Bucky with concern, stock still in the middle of the busy street. It seems offensively sunny for such an occasion, and it's somehow strange to see Bucky's pale, drawn face in broad daylight.

"Yeah." It takes a second, but Bucky swallows convulsively and nods. Steve's not sure it's an honest answer, but he starts walking again anyway, heading to the subway because the quicker they get the hell out of here the better.

He doesn't notice Bucky has held his hand the entire way until they're almost at his apartment. Steve's not sure if the gesture should give him hope or not, but the fact Bucky is still beside him and still breathing certainly does. Small mercies are sometimes the most needed, especially on offensively sunny bad days like today.

 

By the time they get to Steve's apartment, Bucky has started shaking.

It's probably everything hitting him all at once, he thinks dimly. The physical exhaustion and stress and the emotional crash of realising that he's actually doing this. He's disobeying Brock so hard, so fundamentally, that he can never come back from it. Just like the backpack taken out of the closet, stepping into Steve's apartment is indelible, a new threshold.

One small step. One giant leap.

The pills in his system probably don't help him feel steady, although combined with the couple of drinks he'd downed before leaving (courage, cowardice, he doesn't know anymore and isn't sure he cares) he sort of feels like he's sleepwalking his way through this. It's pretty much the only way he's made it this far without breaking down. Except for the moment of weakness where he lost his nerve and bolted straight out of Sam's Place and got halfway down the street before Bobbi caught up to him and talked him down. But Steve doesn't need to know he's still being a fucking moron so he doesn't mention it.

There's a guy in purple sweatpants and a Tweety-Bird t-shirt sitting at the kitchen table when they enter the apartment. It's not like he cuts a threatening figure but Bucky still freezes, hand tightening on the strap of his backpack. Does Brock know where Steve lives? Could he have sent someone to come and fetch him home?

"You remember Clint, right?" Steve closes the door quietly behind them, like a full stop pretending to be a comma. The name makes Bucky's legs go to jelly, just for a second. Okay, he's still safe.

"Hi." Clint (who looks nothing like he did as a teenager, and between him and Steve Bucky's starting to feel like childhood was a different dimension, not just a different time) gives Bucky a little wave, deceptively casual and doing nothing to hide the assessing way he's looking him over.

"Are you a cop?" Bucky doesn't quite know why he blurts that out instead of being polite. Maybe there's not enough energy left to keep his filters running today. Maybe Brock was right about him being unfit for polite company all along. Maybe he should be supervised. Maybe he shouldn't be allowed out.

Maybe he's made a huge fucking mistake.

"Nah. EMT by day, Steve's babysitter by night." Surprisingly, Clint doesn't miss a beat as he gets up from the table and goes to turn on the coffee pot. The kitchen is small and open to the rest of the apartment, appliances mostly patched up with duct tape and what looks suspiciously like some kind of wall plaster. "You mind if I check you over? That's a pretty nasty bruise on your face."

"I'm fine." Bucky's knuckles are white around his bag now where he's starting to feel like he's walked into another trap. Like everyone around him knows what's going on except him. Steve notices his discomfort and touches his arm, making Bucky turn to look at him accusingly. "You set this up."

"He already knew about Brock, I figured you wouldn't see a doctor so…" The confirmation that he wasn't being paranoid doesn't surprise Bucky much, but it also doesn't do a lot to relax him despite Steve's sheepish expression. "I'm sorry, I—"

"It's fine." After another moment or two of hesitation, Bucky sits down gingerly at the table with his bag still over his shoulder like he's not sure what to do with himself. Nobody tells him where to sit or not to sit there when he does, so he figures it's probably okay if this is where he sits. It's making his chest feel like bursting with panic, but he's not getting guidance from anywhere so he had to make a choice whether it's the right one or not.

Credit where it's due, Clint doesn't keep him waiting or give him the chance to think too hard about what he's doing and back out. Steve's roommate isn't wasting any time: already opening what looks like a first aid kit on steroids and pulling on plastic gloves. It's all very sudden and unnerving, but Bucky already agreed and he doesn't want to piss the guy off when he's only been in his home two minutes.

The sight of the gloves makes Bucky close his eyes tightly for a second and swallow hard, suddenly nauseous. At least he's not being humiliated in a police station or a hospital. At least only two people know what a pathetic asshole he is that's he's a grown man who didn't even defend himself when his boyfriend—

"Doesn't feel like there's any fracture." Clint is touching his cheekbone carefully, sending a flash of pressure-pain deep into Bucky's sinuses that draws him out of his head and the doomsday scenarios he's running. "Did you hit your head at all?"

"Last night." When Brock choked him on the bathroom floor, he doesn't elaborate. Clint, thankfully, doesn't ask.

"This fresh too?" He touches the edge of Bucky's scarf, implicitly asking for permission before he removes it. Bucky nods just a twitch, throat bobbing under the smudgy ring of bruises as Clint exposes them fully. He's so ashamed he really might puke right now.

"Does he do this a lot?" Clint's voice is neutral, business-like and calm as he checks the fingerprint bruises on Bucky's throat, runs his fingers carefully over his scalp to check for bumps.

"No." Bucky snaps, quick as a flash to defend Brock like he's listening in to the conversation. It's primal, and he can't tell whose dignity he's trying to protect anymore. "He just lost his temper last night."

"And when did your face happen?" His voice doesn't change at all, neither does his expression, but there's something in Clint's eyes that says he doesn't believe a word that's coming out of Bucky's mouth. It scares him enough that he snaps, trying to distance himself before he's punished for lying.

"He lost his temper twice. Why d'you think I left?" He's very aware of Steve lurking in the background faffing around with coffee, trying to stay out of the way while not wanting to leave Bucky alone. Talking about this is so intensely embarrassing it makes Bucky's teeth hurt, like he's standing in front of a stadium naked and exposed and gritting them to get through it.

"I'm not judging you man, I'm just trying to make sure you're not concussed." Clint doesn't react to the snap, still totally neutral like people lash out at him all the time. It sets Bucky further on edge because at least Brock was consistent, sometimes. "You got any other recent injuries?"

"No."

"Are you taking any medication you've gotta keep up with?" He's clearly going through a checklist, or maybe he smelled alcohol on Bucky's breath, or maybe –

The kitchen smells like fresh coffee now, and it should be comforting but all it makes Bucky think of is the way Brock had smiled at him this morning when he got up early and brought him coffee in bed. The way Brock had told him he was proud when Bucky took his medication without complaint. The way he'd been kind of clingy today, following Brock to the front door like part of him didn't want his boyfriend to leave. The way he won't ever again—

"Can we stop?" He asks quietly, not sure if he's shivering because he's cold or sick or crashing but either way he wants to hide. "I… I'm sorry, I just…"

"No problem. You did good, thanks for letting me make sure you're not about to keel over." Clint backs off immediately, exchanging a glance with Steve that he probably thinks Bucky doesn't see as he strips the latex gloves off and bins them. Bucky doesn't know what the hell to think because is he in trouble for stopping? Is this acceptable? "I'm the only one allowed to crack my head open in this house. Steve'll tell you."

"Yeah, the broken nose thing didn't stop at high school." Steve's smile is forced, the mug of coffee he sets at Bucky's elbow an afterthought when he gets a look at his friend's face. Bucky's pretty sure he looks like shit right now. "Why don't you take a nap, Buck? My room's upstairs and it's pretty quiet up there."

"Is it okay if I shower first?" He feels like a dick as soon as he says it, rationalises that he can handle the sticky feeling of his skin for longer because he can't just invade his friend's apartment and then _ask_ for stuff. This is exactly the kind of shit he pulls that makes Brock call him ungrateful. "Sorry. Sorry, I don't have to."

"Hey, that's fine. I'll find you a towel." Steve gestures with his head and Bucky follows him to the bathroom, accepting the soft blue towel pressed into his hands with what he hopes is a grateful expression. He's just trying to keep it together against the strangeness of everything until he's under running water, he can't handle crying in front of Steve on top of everything else today.

The bathroom is small and dingy, clean enough but definitely not up to Brock's standards. Nobody scrubs these tiles until their skin cracks from chemical cleaners, it looks like people live here and actually use it for its intended purpose. The shower curtain is slightly mildewed at the bottom, there's a crack in the bottom right-hand corner of the mirror, and nobody seems to care about it.

Is this what normal looks like? It's been so long since he's seen it that Bucky thinks he's forgotten.

"I'll grab you some sweatpants and stuff if you want?" Steve breaks into his thoughts gently, obviously concerned but trying to sound like he's not. Bucky's too good at anticipating people's behaviour now to be fooled, and Steve always was an open book. He's being so fucking nice and Bucky doesn't understand _why_ because he hasn't done anything to deserve it.

"Don't have to." Bucky's voice cracks just a little and he can only look at the pained expression on Steve's face for a second before he steps into the bathroom and closes the door behind him.

The door locks. He locks it. Steve doesn't yell although he must have heard it. He's allowed to lock the door.

Bucky doesn't know why that's what breaks him, but sliding the bolt across is the last thing he can manage before he's crumpling to the floor, curling in on himself and hiding his face in his knees to try and keep the sudden, wracking sobs silent as they wrench out of him. He feels like he's in freefall, like he's trying to grab onto something familiar but there's nothing around him but the sound of wind rushing through his ears until he doesn't know which way is up. So he buries his face in his knees and cries, because at least that's something he's done before.

So this the beginning of life after Brock. Crying alone in a bathroom.

Day one is off to a great start.


	5. apartment story

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter!

_Can you carry my drink? I have everything else,_  
_I can tie my tie all by myself_  
_I'm getting tired, I'm forgetting why_

_Oh, we're so disarming, darling, everything we did believe  
Is diving, diving, diving, diving off the balcony_

 

The first couple of weeks Bucky stays with them aren't all that bad, really.

Steve had been expecting him to be upset, to cry and break down and maybe try to run back to his boyfriend, but instead he's just oddly quiet and passive. Too still. There's an atmosphere in the apartment, sure, a tension in the air that's mainly coming from Steve's anticipation of Bucky breaking down, but Bucky himself doesn't seem to fuel it. He finds the strength to smile and hang out and do normal stuff with them, only not radiating sunshine and staring into space numbly when he thinks nobody can see him.

Except Steve is looking, of course, and he sees those moments of absence like they're glaring signposts that Bucky isn't as okay as he's trying to make out. He notices a lot of things about Bucky during those first two weeks, and he's not sure which should concern him. Trying to figure out what's normal when he's really only ever seen Bucky acting a part (and to what extent he doesn't know, which doesn't make anything easier) is harder than he could have imagined.

For a start, he can't tell if Bucky does things around the apartment because he's genuinely being nice and showing gratitude, or if it's a hangover from his relationship and he feels like he has to. It seems patronising to ask, and Steve has no idea how to even start to approach the subject without sounding like he's accusing Bucky of doing something wrong, so he ends up just living with the vague discomfort of the apartment being spotless at all times since Bucky moved in. It would be impossible to tell that Bucky sleeps on the couch if you didn't know, since he's up and packed all his stuff away into his rucksack every day before Steve is even awake. It's like he's not taking up space in the apartment at all, and it's slightly unsettling.

Steve draws his muzzled comic book character sleeping in a box-like chamber, like he's something to be put away when he's not being used. The unnamed character has become therapeutic since this whole thing started, and Steve channels his worries onto the page when he's unable to voice them out loud. He eventually broaches the subject with his roommate, just enough to see if he's the only one who finds Bucky's behaviour strange.

"I was expecting him to be more… sad? I guess?"

"I don't think it's hit him yet." Clint reasons, chewing a mouthful of pepperoni with excessive force as he muses (he seems to do his best thinking while full of pizza). Bucky is in the shower again, he seems to have a thing for rooms that lock and he'll retreat if his smile ever starts to look strained around the edges, and Steve honestly can't think about that too hard and stay calm. "He might be in denial that he's not going back."

"I just… After the thing with his phone…" He pauses and runs a hand over his hair in frustration, taking a second to listen and make sure the shower is still running. Bucky spends more time cleaning the bathroom than using it, and Steve really doesn't think it's a good idea to be overheard talking about this. "I don't think he realises how fucked up that was."

A few days after Bucky left his boyfriend, Sam had turned up at the apartment with the cell phone he hadn't told anyone was missing. He'd left it at the coffee shop when he met Steve, down the back of a couch where Sam found it after Brock had showed up that first evening demanding to know where his boyfriend was. Sam had denied everything and threatened to call the cops, of course, so eventually Brock had to leave without his property. Bucky hadn't seemed surprised or disturbed by that information, had simply thanked Sam and taken his phone back with a resigned expression.

 _"I figured he'd turn the tracker on again, it must've pointed him to yours."_ He'd just stared at the phone in his hand blankly, tiredly, like it was perfectly normal and only slightly irritating that his fiancé would track his movements at all times. _"He used to turn it off when he could trust me. I don't know the password."_

The tracking app doesn't work when the battery is dead, so Bucky's phone now lives on the shelf behind the TV, out of juice and waiting for it to be safe to get charged up again. Steve wonders if that's how Bucky has felt over the last couple of weeks, like he's in limbo and waiting for someone to plug him back into life.

"He's probably gonna need space to get his head around what actually happened." Clint lowers his voice as the shower turns off, clearly sharing Steve's concern about being overheard. "The guy could've been controlling him for six months or six years, you don't process that in a couple of weeks. I treat people at work who've been stabbed by their partner and they still think it's their fault, you need distance from the situation to get perspective on what's normal."

"I just want him to feel like he's safe here, so he can _start_ to process that shit. The way he's behaving… you know it's not us cleaning everything. I'm worried he thinks he's gonna piss us off if he doesn't make himself useful." That's said so quietly it's barely audible over the hum of the fridge, because if that _is_ what Bucky's thinking then Steve is pretty sure hearing it's irrational wouldn't do him any good if he's not ready to accept it. "I don't know if I should talk to him about it or not."

"Maybe try helping him clean?" Neither of them are particularly housework people beyond the necessities of what absolutely has to be done, and the wrinkle in Clint's nose at the suggestion is bizarrely comical in context. "Then it's not his job? You're on a level? He might open up?"

"Couldn't have come up with something that didn't leave me elbow-deep in bleach, huh?" Steve sighs exaggeratedly and clonks his head against Clint's shoulder for a second like an affectionate cat. He's increasingly relieved that there's someone else around to help him figure out this thing with Bucky, because alone he's not sure he wouldn't have fucked it up by now. "What if he just keeps up with the Stepford shit?"

"Then talk to him about it, he seems pretty damn resilient to me. He must be, he survived with Brock that long." Clint shrugs, dropping his pizza crust back in the box like he's suddenly lost his taste for it. "If you've gotta put yourself on mute to survive, sometimes it takes a minute to figure out you've got a voice again. Give him the minute."

Bucky finding his voice doesn't really happen after that, not in a way Steve would have expected. Even when the cops show up to check on him (Brock filed a missing person report and Sam pointed them to Steve when he was assured that they wouldn't pass on Bucky's location) he's quiet. It falls to Clint to explain why he left, and the only time Bucky really seems to give a shit is the vehemence with which he rejects the offer to file charges against his boyfriend. The ring of bruises on his throat has faded to a sickly yellow, and soon it'll be like it wasn't there at all.

Brock is still too deep inside his head for Bucky to let any of himself out, at least in font of anyone if his behaviour is anything to go by, which gives Steve an idea. It's to do with the Bucky he knew, not the Bucky right in front of him, but he refuses to believe that the guy he knew has been totally wiped off the map.

"Do you still write?" He asks one evening, when Bucky's sitting on the couch staring blankly at the TV and nursing a beer like he's not sure if he can ask for another one. He twists to look at Steve in the kitchen with a flicker of doubt in his expression, not sure if he's trying to catch him out, and Steve could murder Brock if he ever sees the guy again.

"Not for a while." He admits slowly, relaxing slightly when Steve holds up another beer in offering and takes the anxiety of asking for it away. "My stuff was never that good and I sorta… it faded out. I left all my notebooks behind, anyway."

Well _that's_ the first time he's acknowledged that his leaving Brock might be permanent since he got here. Steve makes sure his surprise isn't showing on his face as he hands Bucky the beer before jogging up the stairs to his bedroom. There are plenty of sketchbooks stacked up beside his desk, and he has to rummage through them for a minute to find one with lined pages. He clumps back down the stairs and holds the military-green A5 book out to Bucky, who looks at him like he's lost his mind.

"I don't have anything to write about." He reaches out and takes the book hesitantly anyway, as if he's afraid it'll be snatched back if he says the wrong thing. Steve goes back to the kitchen to grab the sandwiches he'd been making, keeping his voice as nonchalant as possible.

"I just had a thought." He dumps the last of the pickle slices onto Bucky's plate (they'd got lunch together a few weeks ago and Bucky had commented jealously on the pickles in Steve's sandwich, mentioning that Brock hated them so much he wouldn't kiss or come near Bucky if he ate them, that he hasn't eaten them for probably five years now as a result, and Steve will be fucking damned if that's going to stand in his house) and delivers the sandwich before flopping down in the battered, ridiculously comfortable armchair they'd appropriated from the street when he was between jobs.

"I'm working on this comic book. It's original, and I'm not much of a writer so I'm kinda struggling with character and putting it together. You think you could help me?"

"You want me to help you?" Bucky looks between the pickle slices and the notebook with anxiety creeping out from behind his mask, and Steve gets ready to take it all back if he's pushed too hard. "Why?"

"'Cause I always kinda liked the stuff you wrote. I can give you the premise and the outline I've got and you can see if it grabs you." Steve smiles slightly in the face of Bucky still watching him warily like he might smack him for giving the wrong answer. He still stringently denies that Brock ever hit him more than twice at the very end, but Steve would bet his Irish grandmother against it from the way his friend behaves. "Only if you want to, Buck. Think about it."

He drops it then, changing the subject to Sam's disastrous lost-a-bet date with Peggy from the coffee shop and debating the legitimacy of hot sauce on a sandwich. Rambling, while not his best quality, seems to calm Bucky down when it's about something innocuous. Actually being able to hear that the person he's with isn't angry about anything, rather than getting into his usual 'there's no evidence they're _not_ angry with me' loop, lets him go off high alert for a minute and relax. It's a physical shift in posture that makes Steve wonder how tightly he's holding himself the rest of the time.

Steve's general ranty nature had been a fun ('fun' in the way that makes him bruise his knuckles at the gym) adventure in getting inside Bucky's head at the beginning of his time here. He never realised that Bucky took his ranting about stuff to mean he was genuinely pissed off until the level of radiating energy and trying to fix the implied problem got ridiculous. It took him grumbling loudly about the state of the fridge one evening, only to come home the next day to find Bucky had basically restored it to factory conditions and replenished it with stuff he knows Steve likes, for him to figure out that his friend was still operating under what he's come to think of as 'Brock protocol'. So now he makes a concerted effort to make Bucky feel at ease, and some of the manic need to keep everyone around him happy and calm seems to be slowly wearing off. Slowly.

"I'll need to borrow a pen. Don't have one of those either." Bucky says quietly, after they've finished their food and are lazily watching reruns of _Friends_ before one of them admits defeat and calls it a night. He's slightly tipsy, always is by this point in the evening, and Steve's not sure how long it's going to take before he doesn't feel the need to drink himself to sleep.

"You still into black ballpoints?" He grins, remembering the long spiel a teenage Bucky had launched into about the merits of his favourite pen ('Signature pen, Steve, it's a _signature_ ') back in his still-clear memories of high school.

"How'd you remember that?" The wondering expression on Bucky's face is at once a thing of beauty and a stab to the gut, and Steve is determined all over again that he's never going to stop reminding Bucky how much he damn well matters.

"'Cause I never realised you were such a nerd before that." _Because that's the moment I think I fell in love with you_ , he doesn't say, sticking to light teasing instead of anything that might be dangerous.

"They're superior! I'm not gonna work in blue!" It's just the same indignant tone Steve remembers, and he can't help but laugh (mostly with relief, because Bucky is still in there somewhere fighting through whatever he's been brainwashed into). A smile tugs at the corners of Bucky's mouth in response, and although it's not the _shiny happy people_ thing he's been doing, smaller and less certain, this time it looks genuine.

"Then you'll be happy to know I've got a million black pens just begging to be used." There's a pen pot on the shelf behind the TV (Clint made it a house rule that there were several around because _I'm fucking sick of getting stabbed in the ass by your fucking pencils, Rogers, put them away_ ), and he grabs a couple of pens and tosses them to Bucky who catches them with another tentative smile.

"Am I allowed to use them on the couch?" It's the totally bland way the question is delivered that catches Steve, and he has to work very hard to get the bolt of anger that shoots through him - at the idea that Bucky still needs to figure out what he's _allowed_ \- under control before he responds.

"Yeah, of course. Why wouldn't you be?" He tries to keep his tone as casual as Bucky's, which seems to work because Bucky is too busy testing out the pens on the first page of his notebook to notice the twisted expression Steve's sure he isn't hiding very well.

"I'm super clumsy. I broke one on the couch at home one time, got ink everywhere. Brock just about lost his mind. I switched to pencil after that, and then I wasn't really writing anyway so…" He trails off, looking slightly like he's daydreaming for a second before he shakes his head and pulls one of his big fake smiles at Steve. "You can give me the comic book stuff if you want. Dunno how much help I'll be, but I'll try."

"Thanks, Buck." Steve gets up to go to bed, because he's on the edge of losing his temper about Brock and Bucky won't get that it's not directed at him, but he can't stop himself bending down and pulling Bucky into a quick hug first. Bucky doesn't even question it, just rests his cheek against Steve's shoulder and hugs him back like he's starved for affection. Which he probably is, to be honest. "I'll give it to you in the morning."

A few angry sketches later (Brock with a mutilated face probably doesn't say anything particularly healthy about his mental state, but Steve can't bring himself to care) and he's calm enough to write down some notes about the vague story he's been tinkering with to go with his muzzled sketches. He's not lying about having next to no idea about character and plot and building a story, so he just sketches everything out in the broadest strokes he can.

_Starts out historical, maybe WW1/2? Best friends in army. They both get superpowers and transported to the future somehow (Marvel/DC okay I know), except one is a good guy and one got captured/tortured/brainwashed by the bad guys. Brainwashed one is assassin used as a weapon against his will, sent to kill best friend but doesn't know him? Until he does? Maybe? So best friends as enemies? This is literally all I've got so if you have ideas run with it!!_

He dithers over attaching a sketch, because Bucky seeing his own face on a victim of brainwashing is probably not going to get a great reaction at this point, and he'll probably change the face before he has to actually show the panels to anyone. Eventually Steve settles for a drawing where his muzzled assassin's face is fully covered, goggles and hair obscuring what the mask doesn't. He paperclips the sketch and note together and pads quietly down the stairs now all the lights are out.

Bucky is asleep in front of the nearly-muted TV, sprawled out with his head pillowed on his arm and a half-empty beer dangling from his hand. Steve carefully takes the beer and pulls the blanket off the back of the couch to throw over his friend, because Bucky's always a heavy sleeper when he's been drinking and an earthquake wouldn't wake him now. He lays the sketch and notes on the coffee table next to the open green notebook, and catches sight of Bucky's scrawl in the dim light where he's written his name on the inside cover just like he used to. It's not a big thing, but the messy handwriting still makes Steve smile.

_~~Jim~~ Bucky Barnes_

 

Writing has always been cathartic for Bucky, a fact he'd almost forgotten after not doing it for so long, and something about the comic book project grabs him by the throat and just won't let him go from the moment he sees the initial sketch.

He pours himself into the character, the unnamed soldier forced to fight a war he never chose, the man out of time silenced by people who don't give a shit about anything but how he can fulfil their purposes. He finds himself fleshing out an entire backstory for what he comes to call 'the Asset' because he's never been great at names, ready with notes and answers when Steve asks him for references like feelings and facial expressions.

 _"He wouldn't react because he's not allowed to have feelings."_ He finds himself explaining over dinner, which is more drinking than eating for him lately. The more he works out the character, the more shaking things loose by (secretly) drawing on his own experiences hurts and he tries to numb himself. _"He's not a person, he's a thing that serves a purpose. They wouldn't consider him and he wouldn't expect to be considered. He's basically an it."_

He's got no idea what kind of story Steve is working all this into, but some of the questions sometimes surprise him ('how would the Asset feel about displeasing his handlers?' just makes his head hurt, so he writes it down in the notebook to come back to another day). The deeper he gets into the project the more research he does, and the harder things get. It's trying to find specific vocabulary to describe the brainwashing process that trips a switch in Bucky and leaves him staring at his laptop screen with wide eyes.

_Gaslighting is a form of mental abuse in which information is twisted or spun, selectively omitted to favour the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity._

That shakes something loose in him at his core, that shakes up Dr Zola and the pills and the idea of Brock trying to protect him from himself by hurting him and the accusations of cheating that never happened, and some long-sleeping part of Bucky wakes up. He's suddenly so blindingly angry that his hands start shaking, and it goes on for so long that he gropes in his backpack for the leftovers of his bullshit prescription to calm him down. (Is it bullshit? Was it _all_ bullshit? Was he just tricked and manipulated this entire time?).

The pills Brock gave him made everything easier, didn't even give him the chance to think, let alone the opportunity to think too much. Now his future is in tatters and even his purpose in the present hurts, so the part of him that had been achingly sad about his situation now goes _fuck it_ , why should Bucky think at all? Who's going to stop him cutting loose if that's what he wants to do? Who's going to _make him_ now?

His friends keep telling him that nobody's in charge of him except himself (he's even _asked_ for instructions and been met with refusal and concerned looks), but he's not convinced that's actually the truth. Maybe he wasn't completely stupid about Brock the whole time. Maybe he can prove that. If he can just push them into showing their true colours, maybe they'll jerk the choke chain they're trying to tell him is jewellery and rein him in if he misbehaves enough.

He just wants to _know_.

The heavy drinking doesn't escalate over time, it comes into being fully formed that day, when Bucky says _fuck it_ and demolishes half a bottle of cheap vodka because his head is hurting and he's so angry he thinks he might yell at Clint or Steve if he doesn't calm himself down and that's _not_ allowed. The next morning he feels like shit, of course, which only makes him remember that hangovers were one time when Brock was consistently sweet to him. They'd cuddle up on the couch on Sunday mornings, be miserable together after a heavy Saturday night.

He's alone on the couch now, and he's so angry about it he might burst.

Clint and Steve are weirdly tolerant of his binges after that, only a mild _'We're gonna have to start recycling'_ comment from Clint at the number of bottles collecting around the trash in the way of reproach. Steve is obviously concerned, but he still doesn't ever try and tell Bucky what he can and can't do. It's almost infuriating, a foreign frustration that Bucky hasn't allowed himself to feel for so long that he barely recognises it, because how can he be expected to behave properly if no one corrects him? Who the hell is in charge around here? Does he even want anyone to be in charge?

The leftovers from the prescription mixed with vodka do interesting things, make Bucky so heavy-limbed and cotton-brained that he can't think about anything at all, let alone concentrate on how miserable he is. He gives his sober hours over to the Asset project, because that's one area where he feels like he's actually being useful, and the rest he spends taking increasing risks with himself. He still daydreams, and although Brock is always sweet in his dreams like every day is Sunday, they're not as sunny as they used to be. He notices things now, when things were wrong or _not normal_ and he'd never seen it at the time. It infuriates him that he couldn't even be left with his dreams intact. He couldn't be left with any part of himself not tainted.

The first guy has Brock's dark hair and sculpted cheekbones.

Bucky sucks him off in a dingy bathroom stall while the muffled bass thumping through from the club makes the toilet paper holder rattle. The guy is polite, doesn't pull Bucky's hair or come without warning him first. He asks for Bucky's number as he's tucking himself back into his pants, but Bucky leaves without even answering. It feels good to be callous, to not fawn and appease the guy just in case he'll get mad. Selfish feels good, sort of, at least as much as anything does.

The second and third guys he barely remembers, so drunk he can hardly stay on his feet with the way everything spins as they fuck him against the wall (one in a bathroom, one in a cold alley that stinks of piss). The fourth guy tries to cuddle after and Bucky leaves the bed to throw up because he can't handle tenderness. The fifth guy cuts him a few lines of coke and they fuck all night without ever exchanging names. Bucky loses count after that.

It's not like the guys matter, anyway. What matters is that Brock always accused him of sleeping with every guy under the sun but Bucky never, ever did. His early twenties were boring and pointless because he was practically married and ended up a cross between a domestic servant and a pet, so why shouldn't he make up for lost time now? Nobody is telling him no, and it almost feels good to do this out of spite, to imagine Brock walking in and seeing him on his knees for another man and hoping it would shatter that fragile self-esteem that Bucky burned himself up babying.

The fact he's burning himself up all over again now doesn't really matter to him, not as long as he's the one setting the fire.

"You're being safe, right?" Clint asks him one night, when Bucky couldn't see straight to get his key in the door and his friend had found him passed out in the hall at the end of his night shift. "You're using condoms with these guys?"

"Think so." Bucky is blearily gulping down his second glass of water, pupils huge as he squints at Clint in the dim kitchen light that's clearly too bright for him right now. He can't remember what the guy called the pills he'd offered him, but it's not like Bucky hasn't been stupid enough to take mystery pills from a hot guy before so _fuck it_. "Not like it matters."

"It matters to me. I know it matters to Steve. We care about you, y'know?" The mention of Steve's name is enough to send guilt swimming over Bucky's unguarded expression, and the pair of them are going to break Clint's fucking heart one of these days. "I thought the point of leaving Brock was that you didn't want to die."

"I don't." Bucky actually looks _offended_ by the implication, which is no small relief to Clint. If Bucky got himself killed then he doesn't think Steve would ever be able to come back from it. Not when he's only just got him back.

"You're going a pretty good impression of acting like you do, lately." He shrugs, forcibly nonchalant as he takes Bucky's glass away before he can make himself sick. "You don't seem to give much of a shit about keeping yourself safe."

"Yeah, well. I had enough of someone _keeping me safe_ to last a lifetime." Bucky can taste the bitterness sour on the back of his tongue and he wishes he had a drink in his hand right now. Clint makes a small sound in the back of his throat that Bucky can't interpret, and the flash of panic that sends through him ( _has he pissed him off will he swing will he_ ) just makes him hate himself at this point.

"Listen, I dunno if you're waiting for someone to tell you to stop what you're doing, but that's not gonna happen. You make your own rules now, like it or not."

"I do like it, I just…" Bucky runs a hand unsteadily through his hair, making it stick up at odd angles where it's starting to get long now (because _fuck you Brock I can do what I want with my hair_ ). He's drunk enough to let his mouth run, to not keep up the sunny, bland façade of everything being _just fine_. "I don't know how to be in charge of myself. I've always had someone else in control or been working within guidelines and I… clearly I needed that. Look at me now, I obviously can't take care of myself without someone telling me what to do."

He hadn't expected _that_ to come out. It sounds more like something the Asset would think, and Bucky really doesn't need to draw that parallel when he already wants to punch himself in the face for opening his stupid mouth.

"Man, nobody knows what they're doing. You just kinda learn to wing it." Clint's expression is open, genuine, and Bucky's fairly sure he's not being manipulated right now. Fairly. He and Clint have become close over his time here, mostly because Clint couldn't even begin to take shit from anybody and even Bucky's not desperate enough to try and fuck a straight guy. "Nobody is gonna run your life again. That's not gonna happen. So if drinking and drugs and screwing random guys makes you happy then do that, but if it doesn't then you've gotta figure that out for yourself. Nobody's gonna swoop in and take over."

"What if I do something wrong?" There's that lost feeling in his gut again, that same one he'd had the first time he walked into this kitchen and couldn't decide where to sit because nobody gave him an instruction. He's come a long way from there, at least he hopes so, but it doesn't feel like that tonight.

"You will. But it's okay to do things wrong, I do like twelve wrong things before breakfast every day." Clint smiles slightly, and Bucky doesn't understand why he's so choked up all of a sudden. "Nobody's right all the time, man. Not even your ex."

Steve wakes up the next morning to find a note on top of his 'Asset' project folder in Bucky's familiar, spiky scrawl. He hasn't made suggestions about the direction of the project or the story so far, merely about the assassin character and his internal life and history, and the note makes affection spread warmly through Steve's chest. Because Bucky never used to be able to keep his opinions to himself, and there's a tiny sliver of that poking through the sure strokes of his suggestion.

_What if the Asset escapes? What if he saves himself?_

Meeting Clint's girlfriend should have been the least threatening thing to happen to Bucky lately, because by all accounts she's awesome and the only ass she kicks is Clint's in the bedroom. He's heard plenty about Natasha from Steve (she's slightly terrifying but actually super nice, a black belt in at least three martial arts, and met Clint on a sign language course so they don't even have to talk about you behind your back when they can do it right in front of you), but nothing could have prepared Bucky for the reality of meeting her. Nobody could have predicted that.

It's been a good day so far, and he's even humming to himself as he grabs more beers from the fridge (Bucky's lifelong habits of singing and talking to himself drove Brock crazy so he'd shut himself up years ago, and the first time Steve heard him singing _Hey Jude_ under his breath he'd hugged Bucky so hard his spine popped). He's levelled out a little in the couple of weeks since he talked to Clint and realised he was actually steering his own ship now, he's not drinking so much and not fucking around with random guys (lusting after Steve is _very_ inconvenient and still makes him feel guilty as hell because how _dare_ he be looking at another guy like that when he just got out of a relationship where he was going to get married). He's starting to accept that there will be good days and bad days for the foreseeable future, lurching from celebrating his freedom to guilt and anger to grieving as he figures out what the fuck he's supposed to do with his shattered life, but today is one of the good ones and he'll take what he can get.

Sam and Natasha are coming over to watch some massively over-hyped boxing match, and Bucky's doing a decent job of focusing on widening his social circle instead of obsessing over the fact that across town, Brock is watching the same fight. He can't stop himself thinking about how he'd normally be cuddled up with his boyfriend, listening to the same glory-days I-coulda-been-a-contender stories that always bubbled up after a few beers, probably end up on his knees giving a consolatory blowjob by the time the fight ended to calm Brock down. Bucky can't stop the thoughts entering his head, but he doesn't let himself dwell or start talking himself into thinking he'd be better off back there again. He wants to be here, safe with Clint and Steve where nobody yells at him or makes him feel like he has to suck their dick to apologise for something he hasn't done, and he's not about to let his brain fuck that up for him, even if he has to talk himself down ten times a day.

The anger has abated, just a little, though it's still buzzing right below the surface and ready to be vented at any moment. He's still a pressure cooker and he still sometimes drinks himself to sleep just to shut his guilty head up (because he still _worries_ about Brock and how can he worry about the guy? How fucked up is he?), but for the most part he's started to feel numb towards his ex. He still loves him, he's pretty sure he's always going to love him, but Brock's feelings and well-being aren't the first thing he thinks about when he wakes up in the morning these days.

The fact he's back to not reacting is what bothers him now, the insidious idea that things couldn't have really been that bad if he didn't go to pieces once he got away. He's been perfectly functional the whole time (which he knows Steve would say is debatable at best, but everyone has crutches and he's been behaving just fine in front of people which is all he needs to do), and Bucky is starting to wonder if he's talked himself into thinking he was abused. If actually he's embellishing how bad things were in his memories. He shoves it all onto the Asset project and doesn't think about it, tries to stay at arm's length from himself and bury his head in the sand.

When Natasha shows up, buzzing out a tune on the intercom so they let her up immediately, all his good feeling and hard work goes straight to hell. He can't bury his head in the sand anymore, not when his past comes screaming up to meet him like the ground at the end of a very long fall.

"This is Bucky, Steve's, uh, friend." Clint pulls Natasha through to the kitchen and introduces them with a winning smile. He's pretty obviously besotted with her and so proud to be standing next to her right now, and Bucky can remember clear as crystal how Brock used to look at him like that. "Buck, this is Natasha."

She's strangely familiar, the red hair and pale blue eyes inspiring some faint recognition that Bucky can't place. It's only as they say hi and shake hands that he catches her look, assessing like she's trying to place him somewhere too, and that searching expression is what does it. They both realise where they know each other from at exactly the same time.

Oh. Fuck.

"Barnes, right? You look so different now." An almost relieved expression crosses her face when she realises who he is, which is totally opposite to the paralysing panic that has Bucky frozen to the spot. Steve has just wandered over from the couch to say hi and suddenly everything is too bright and too close and he wants to run. "I was worried when you stopped coming in, I thought something happened to you."

"You two know each other?" Steve asks with mild curiosity, grabbing chips and handing Natasha a beer oblivious to the fact that Bucky's starting to feel like he can't breathe.

"He used to come into the pharmacy all the time." She shoots Clint a meaningful look and Bucky wants to _die_ because this can't be happening. "Remember that customer you asked about?"

"The one whose boyfriend…" Clint looks between her and Bucky with dawning realisation and Bucky realises there's no way he can keep this part a secret when there are credit card charges and receipts and first aid supplies and painkillers and prescriptions to prove him wrong. And now Steve is looking at him too and no, no they're not supposed to know. "Oh. I thought you said he didn't—"

"I gotta…" He turns on his heel and exits the conversation as quickly as possible, bolting into the bathroom and locking the door behind him with his heart threatening to hammer right out of his chest. Locked in. Safe. Now everyone is going to know what a moron he really is and he's hiding in a bathroom like an even bigger one.

He's not even alone for thirty seconds when there's a knock at the door. Bucky debates staying in there and locking everyone out, but then they'd _definitely_ know there was something wrong, and he hasn't broken down in front of anyone yet so he's not about to start now. He steels himself and tries to force himself to stop shaking as he opens up the door.

To his surprise, Clint is on the other side of the door with Steve and Natasha nowhere in sight. Steve has an ongoing case of foot in mouth disease that's been going since at least the early 2000s, and it makes Bucky feel slightly sick and dizzy to think they might have _discussed_ who was going to come after him. At least Clint is probably going to be tactful enough to not get the sharp end of Bucky's barely-controlled defensive temper, and probably be able to disguise his disgust at the fact that Bucky was perfectly capable of defending himself and he still…

"Why didn't you ever tell us he—"

"Because I didn't want you to think I was a fucking idiot, okay?" Bucky's 'safe place' tends to be on the bathroom floor, back against the tub in the cramped space, and he slumps down there now because they're already thinking he's a broken mess so _fuck it_. Clint folds himself down to sit in the doorway so he doesn't make things even more crowded. "Who the fuck stays with someone who beats them and isn't a complete moron?"

"A lotta people." Clint takes in Bucky's posture, closed in on himself and just radiating shame so hard that it hurts from feet away. Natasha had told him about the customer she suspected was being abused _years_ ago, a hell of a lot further back than the 'he only hit me twice' that Bucky's been clinging to like gospel. "It's not hard to rationalise stuff when you love someone."

"But I… Man, I was so fucking stupid. I'd go out with a black eye and feel bad that I made him hit me. I'd be ashamed because people might figure out what an asshole I was." Bucky puts his face in his hands like he's physically holding himself together and hiding at the same time. "And your girlfriend saw me as that fucked up, weak little asshole that I'd choke out _myself_ now. She knows me as a guy that was so stupid—"

"You weren't stupid."

"Yeah? What d'you call it then?" Bucky feels spiteful again all of a sudden, like he wants to scratch his own eyes out for being so blinded by Brock. He grabs his hair and tugs, the burst of pain feeling justified. "Brainwashed. Fucking brainwashed moron."

"Listen to me, you little shit. I don't tell people this a lot so shut up and listen." Clint almost sounds determined, something forceful under his words, and it's enough to make Bucky stop his tirade of bitterness at himself and pay attention.

The TV is noisy out in the living room, there's the sound of Natasha laughing in the kitchen, and it's so normal that it's almost like everything isn't irredeemably broken. Bucky could almost believe this is part of a story he's going to tell one day, something he could write, not something sharp and ugly clawing through him relentlessly that never seems to end. That the past could almost be in the past, one day.

"The reason my nose was always broken in high school is because my Dad drank a lot, and he used to lose his temper about nothing and wale on us." Clint recounts it evenly, like it's a story and not something that _happened_ , and Bucky can't imagine he could ever be that composed while talking about Brock. "I felt like an idiot about it for a long time. I was mad at myself, I goddamn hated myself. I felt like I must've done something to make him do that. I was ashamed of how dumb I was that my own Dad couldn't stand me."

"You were just a kid." Bucky protests quietly, wind of self-hatred taken out of his sails by hearing it reflected back at him from someone as _stable_ and even as Clint.

"And Brock made it so you had about as much power in the situation as I did back then. And it damn sure wasn't my fucking fault." Clint watches Bucky's mouth twist as he tries to get a lid on his emotions and thankfully doesn't say anything about the loss of composure. "I ain't your Mr Miyagi, alright? I can't tell you how to handle this. All I can do is tell you that you staying wasn't stupid, because he didn't let you think there were any other options. Nobody is gonna blame you for what happened to you. You didn't cause it, you did what you had to do to get through it, and you survived."

"Can you…" Bucky's hands are trembling where they rest on his knees, and he keeps his eyes turned down like the thickness of his voice isn't already giving away how emotional he is. He's not breaking down in front of someone, he's _not_. "Is it okay…"

He doesn't have to force the rest of the words out, because Clint is already wrapping thick arms around him and holding him tight. Bucky lets himself shake apart for a minute then, because this isn't Steve and he doesn't have to be strong to stop that pained expression Steve thinks he doesn't see when he lets a little of himself out. Even as he tells himself _that it's not even a comparable situation and of course a kid isn't to blame for being abused but he was an adult and he could've—_ even as that train of thought rolls through him, a smaller, quieter voice says _you survived_.

"You already knew he did that, didn't you?" The question comes out stronger than he'd expected it to, his voice steady because he now _believes_ , rather than just knows, that Clint isn't going to get mad at him for saying the wrong thing.

"Kinda figured it out." Comes the admission, as he's released from the hug that put him back together for a minute. Bucky scrubs a hand over his face and blows out a long breath because fuck, he's got to pull himself together.

"Does Steve know?"

"Yeah." Clint doesn't try and bullshit him, and Bucky appreciates it more than he can say. "He doesn't think you're stupid. Neither does Nat, for the record."

"So I'm the only one." Bucky snorts derisively at his own admission, because it's weirdly, slightly hysterically funny that he's been so worried about keeping his mistakes locked up tight when apparently everyone fucking knew about it anyway. "Who the fuck was I kidding?"

"Yep, party of one thinking you're stupid." Clint claps him on the shoulder and then pushes himself up off the floor, seemingly unaffected by sharing his past like that. It seems oddly aspirational to Bucky, that if he gets through all the bullshit now he might be able to talk about what happened with Brock without feeling like he wants to stab himself in the face. "You coming to watch the fight, or you need a minute?"

"Nah, I think I'm good."

Bucky takes the offered hand up after only a second of hesitation. Getting over it has to start somewhere, he guesses.

 

"All I'm saying is, I'm writing the fucking screenplays and I never see the end product." Bucky throws the rubber ball up the stairs again, smirking with satisfaction when he gets a yelp from Steve wherever it connected with him. He's always had good aim. "C'mon asshole, I wanna see the Winter Soldier."

Things have changed a lot over the past month, some for the better and some, inevitably, for the worse. Bucky is secure enough in himself now to ask for things, to express a preference without being pushed and to tell Clint to clean his own damn dishes when he leaves them in the sink for three days in a row. He's starting to think about leaving the apartment too, has tentatively been in contact with his sister again and has been presented with the idea of sharing an apartment with her when she moves back to the city. As much as he'd like to stay with Steve and Clint, the apartment really isn't built for three people and the couch is doing murder on his back.

He could be sharing a bed in the house, he figured out a few weeks ago, but he's not sure he's ready for that. Steve is head over heels for him, Bucky realised once he stopped being so caught up in his own head that everyone around him was nothing more than a shadow or a threat, and that knowledge had made things weird between them for a minute or two. Steve has never been anything but a perfect gentleman, and he would never have told Bucky how he felt if he wasn't the world's most open book and broadcasting it from every pore of his oversized body. And it's not like Bucky doesn't have some feelings in return, not like he hasn't kind of held a candle for Steve since they were fifteen, hidden deep inside him where even Brock couldn't blow it out. But it made things weird because the idea of returning feelings for someone who wasn't his partner of nearly ten years sent a wave of guilt over Bucky and even washed him out of the apartment for the night.

He found himself outside Brock's building in the dark, looking up the window he used to sit and daydream at. He used to make up stories about the people down here, used to look at freedom from afar and think he was better off in the protective embrace of solitude and silence than the uncertainty and shittiness and joy of life. But he's not the princess in the tower anymore, and he's not a housewife or a pet, and he'd turned around and got back on the subway and picked up pizza on his way home because this was normal life now.

And when Steve had smiled at him, Bucky had damn well smiled back and let himself enjoy it.

"Don't make me hang you upside down by your ankles, Rogers!" He calls up the stairs, dodging the rubber ball when it comes back aimed squarely at his head. "Show me the damn panels!"

"You couldn't even pick me up now." Steve calls back, clearly amused. To be fair, Bucky had only hung him upside down once and been punched in the dick for his trouble, and Steve's probably right that he wouldn't be able to pick up the giant man he's become. Still, it's nice to go through the motions of their back and forth again, to feel that familiar push and pull he'd missed so much when everything was just push.

A box got delivered to Bucky's office last week (because he can work in his goddamn office again and it feels so good to come home and bitch about his co-workers at the end of the day, to feel like he's _allowed_ to complain about trivial shit without being ungrateful), and when he brought it home and opened it he found the notebooks he'd left behind with his old life, torn into pieces. Every page he'd poured his heart into was laid out in front of him, shredded. Bucky threw them straight in the trash, because his green notebook is almost full now and he'd chosen the next one (with a sparkly purple cover that Clint had vocally approved of) all on his own. He doesn't need the past anymore, not when it's been designed to hurt him. He doesn't want any more weapons when he's defused enough within himself.

"Sounds like a challenge." He thuds up the stairs despite Steve's protests, because he's about to try and pick this asshole up out of pride, never mind what it does to his back.

Steve is sitting at his desk when Bucky slips on the top of the stairs in his sock feet and stumbles into the room like some kind of farce. He skids into Steve's colourful rug and pauses for a second to shove the overgrown hair out of his eyes (because he always liked it long and he sees himself again when he looks in the mirror now) before continuing on his mission. Steve is leaning awkwardly over the desk like he's trying to cover up porn, and Bucky nudges him aside with a playful confidence he wouldn't have had three months ago.

"I'm not gonna laugh or…"

Bucky can feel his face heat up as he stares at the pictures, frozen in his tracks. The comic book pages are angular and clean in their design, and all he can recognise is the muzzled, shadowy figure he's been fleshing out behind the scenes. That's not what makes him stop, it's his own eyes staring back at him from a sketch pushed towards the back of the desk like reference material.

"Is this me?" He reaches out uncertainly and touches the very corner of the page with his fingertip, like he's concerned he'll contaminate the drawing.

The sketch is chalk and charcoal, carved out of the paper with echoing, messy strokes unlike Steve's usual style. It makes Bucky look like a ghost in the eye of a storm, like he's a still, silent point in the midst of the darkness swirling all around him. His eyes are practically black holes, staring out at the viewer like a plea above the muzzle.

It's the Asset, alright, but he's wearing Bucky's face. 

"It's, uh, that's the Winter Soldier." Steve is scratching awkwardly at the back of his neck, shifting his weight between his feet where he jumped up at Bucky's shove like he'd been caught doing something private. That's kind of how Bucky feels, like he's seeing something he's not supposed to, and for a moment he shares the embarrassment before he realises it's fucking _him_ in the picture and he's got no reason to be embarrassed. "I started drawing him after the, uh, after I started to think Brock probably wasn't treating you so good. Like catharsis because I was so worried. And, well…"

Hot anger swells up in Bucky's chest for a moment as he stares at the picture, makes his hands tingle and his hearing fade because how _dare_ he?

How dare he steal Bucky's face and slap it on this broken man who had to fight to learn how to be a human again after being systematically broken? How dare he put Bucky's face on a character who was forced to forget how to be a person and only serve the needs of others? To doubt his own mind and be drugged into compliance and brainwashed? How dare he act like anything Bucky went through…

Oh.

The parallels hit Bucky all at once like a slap to the back of the head. What a total dumbass he's been. Of course it's based on his fucking…

Well, fuck.

"Oh my god." Bucky stares at the picture for another long moment before he tears himself away to glare at Steve, standing there like he's ashamed of all six-plus feet of him. He's sort of pissed and sort of wants to laugh and he can't figure out which he's actually feeling. Is it relief? Some kind of resolution? "I bet you think you're real stealth, don't you?"

"Uh…"

"I mean, seriously. Don't quit your day job, asshole." He pokes Steve in the chest and it's sort of amusing the way Steve turns pale like he's not sure if he's about to get punched. Bucky wouldn't have done that three months ago and it's kind of satisfying. "Jokes on you, Captain Obvious, because you're not stealthy. I'm just really slow on the uptake. Don't think you're not still an open fucking book, just 'cause you could pull one over on me while I've been distracted."

"I didn't mean—"

"Although, it is kinda creepy. I get why you didn't tell me, but c'mon. I feel like you're gonna Buffalo Bill me, sitting up here drawing pictures of me. Do I need to watch my hide? You gonna try and take a piece of this ass for your shrine?"

He can see the moment Steve realises that Bucky's making fun of him, making fun of himself, and a smile breaks over Steve's nervous expression as Bucky struggles to keep a straight face. He thinks this is happiness.

"There aren't a lot of people dumb enough to fall for your bullshit, Rogers. You got lucky. Fictional character my ass." Bucky shakes his head, a little more fragile than he wants to be and a lot more strident than he was, and definitely more shaken up by the revelation of the Winter Soldier's identity than he's trying to let on.

It had been so much easier to process his thoughts and feelings when it wasn't him, when he'd thought he was just drawing from his own experience to build a character like he used to, back when he thought he was going to make a career out of writing and took it seriously. Before Brock read part of his novel and twisted up his face like he was trying to find a way to lie and say he liked it and Bucky had started to look for jobs in editing instead because he was chasing a pipe dream. It's unsettling to realise he'd been putting his experiences onto a character that was based on _him_ , that he hadn't been the only one who knew he was processing through the Solider, but he doesn't think Steve was trying to catch him out for any nefarious purpose.

In fact, he's pretty sure Steve might have inadvertently given him the tools to save himself. That's worth having the wool pulled over his eyes by the most easily-read man in the Tri-State area, he thinks. If only the once.

"You're not dumb." Steve looks almost offended on his behalf, despite the smile still tugging at his lips, and he's still not ready to actually do it but Bucky could imagine kissing those lips right now.

"Shut up. Was dumb enough to not see you were making me write about my own fucking life. You _smart guy_." Bucky rolls his eyes and opens his arms, and if his hands are shaking a little neither of them are going to say anything about it. "C'mon. You can hug me."

"Oh, thanks. Real kind of you." Steve returns snark for snark, but he pulls Bucky into a crushing hug that's so tight it drives all the air out of his lungs like a sob. It's not, of course, because Bucky has yet to go to pieces in front of anyone, let alone Steve. But, he thinks as he buries his face in Steve's shoulder and hugs him back just as tight, one day he could be vulnerable in front of him. He could do that.

Steve is clearly relieved to hear Bucky making fun of him, making fun of himself, and sounding more like the sharp, funny guy he used to know instead of a shell. He's been hollowed out for far too long, hard and fake to mask the breakable turmoil underneath, and it feels good to just _be_ again. The abuse and control and not knowing his own mind, all that is starting to feel like it belongs to the Asset now, like it's becoming a story he can tell.

He thinks about kissing Steve, when they pull apart. He thinks about the last time he was in Brock's arms, about the difference between his lean frame and Steve's bulk, about the different ways they smell and how one held him like glass and one squeezes him like he's diamond hard. He thinks about a lot of things all at once, and then Bucky kisses Steve on the cheek. It's just a light brush of lips against stubble, but it nonetheless makes him flush pink to the tips of his ears and gives Bucky a weird bubble of lightness in his chest.

Things are very quiet then, but it's a good quiet. He turns back to the desk and looks at the pictures again, with Steve still warm and solid and safe against him like he's always been there.

"This guy's having a terrible time, huh?" Bucky does touch the drawing this time, runs his finger over the charcoal so it smears and gets into the grooves of his fingerprint. They've marked each other now, him and the Asset, and only in one way that's going to wash off in the shower in a room that locks.

"Yeah." Steve looks at him and Bucky looks back steadily, because they both know what he's saying but somehow it's no longer enough to just imply it. It's not enough to hide behind the metaphor anymore, because Bucky has decided that he's finally done hiding.

Silence is what got him here, and he doesn't want that anymore.

"It was really bad." The words are half a whisper, the admission not forced out but slipping easily like ink into water. This is the ice around Bucky cracking open, what was once restraining and then protective finally splitting, finally letting who he is underneath spill out freely. "Wasn't it?"

"Yeah." Steve's arm is still around Bucky's shoulders, and he squeezes him just a little. Bucky leans into the touch without hesitation, because he's got nothing to feel guilty about anymore. "It was."

"Was." Bucky meets the Asset's eyes in the picture and nods, just slightly, to his shadow. "Past tense."

The silence is comfortable then, and Bucky lays his head on Steve's shoulder and closes his eyes without fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next and final part is the epilogue. Thank you so much for reading and commenting, I'd love to know what you thought!
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at saferforeveryone.tumblr.com


	6. if

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and commenting everyone, this has been a very personal and emotional story to write and I'm so grateful every time you've let me know you're enjoying it. Thank you for sharing your experiences and your thoughts, you're all wonderful!

_If you can make one heap of all your winnings_  
_And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,_  
_And lose, and start again at your beginnings_  
_And never breathe a word about your loss;_  
_If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew_  
_To serve your turn long after they are gone,_  
_And so hold on when there is nothing in you_  
_Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’_

 

**Epilogue: Five Years Later**

 

"Y'know, for an artist you have terrible taste." Bucky squints at the table like it's personally offended him, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear where it's fallen out of his neat bun in the heat of the day. "Can't we just go to—"

"If you say IKEA we're getting divorced." It's a hollow threat, and Bucky sticks his tongue out cheekily as Steve is still delivering it. Steve rubs a hand over his beard as he frowns at the bottle-green glass table again, disappointed himself but clearly not eager to admit that Bucky's right. "It's not exactly what I was picturing."

The fancy furniture boutique is the kind of store Steve is forever dragging them into, ever since the Winter Solider comic got picked up for national distribution and IKEA was suddenly not the upper limit of their price range. It's not like they're _rich_ now, but the last few years have seen them make a pretty decent living from Steve illustrating full-time and Bucky finally moving from editing into writing his own material. His last book didn't sell like crazy, but it was critically well-received and he has enough projects (comics, short stories, a novelisation if the movie rights to the Winter Soldier get picked up) in the pipeline to last him well into the next year.

It's not consistent work, but it gives him the space to step back and get his head straight if he needs to. They take care to have those failsafes now, make sure that both of them have a way to put the brakes on if they need it before things get overwhelming. Bucky still has a smaller tolerance for anxiety than he used to, and Steve still tends to worry himself into stress breakdowns about it, but the balance they've struck works these days. They like the normal they've carved out for themselves.

"I told you, never trust the website description. I used to write those things and lemme tell you, nobody involved gives a single shit about accuracy." He blushes pink to the roots of his hair when Steve slings an arm around his shoulders and smacks a big kiss to his cheek out of the blue. "The hell's that for?"

"Just picturing you writing shitty descriptions of tables and being sarcastic as fuck about it. S'cute." Steve kisses him again for good measure, just to make him blush harder. It's a habit of his that Bucky can't convincingly claim to hate, much to his own disgust.

"Yeah, well. There was less cute and more day-drinking than you'd expect." Bucky pokes Steve in the side petulantly and his husband just laughs.

For all he tries to deny it, Bucky secretly loves Steve's excessive, sickly PDAs. After being treated like Brock was ashamed of being seen with him for so long (or actually ashamed of being seen with a guy, as Bucky later figured out with his therapist), Bucky thrives under Steve's public affection and drinks it in like sunlight. Steve is totally aware of this, of course, after Bucky was shocked enough to almost lose his carefully-cultivated composure the first time Steve kissed him in Sam's Place (in front of _people_ ), so goes out of his way to shower his husband with love at the smallest excuse. And most of the time without one too.

"Day-drinking in your sweats? Be still my throbbing boner." Steve deadpans, much too loudly, and gets a slightly alarmed look from a refined old lady examining standing lamps a few feet away.

"Unshowered. Add that to your spank bank."

"You're killing me." He makes his knees go weak and 'collapses' on Bucky exaggeratedly, which gets them another weird look that Steve considers totally worth the surprised laugh it pulls out of his husband.

They can joke about it now, but there were points during the last five years when Bucky's drinking wasn't something to laugh at. It had become more of a crutch during his relationship with Brock than he'd realised, and even after his post-leaving binges slowed down and he got less self-destructive, there were still days or even weeks at a time when Bucky was rarely sober. He hid it pretty well, at least some of the time, and there were times Steve didn't know his boyfriend had been drinking at all until he kissed him and tasted vodka.

The biggest problem was the anxiety that Bucky was trying and failing to manage by being consistently half cut. None of them had realised just how tightly wound he was and how much energy was going into maintaining his composure for fear of being vulnerable. He acted like showing any chink in his armour would let someone squirm back through it and take over again, but he was crashing in slow-motion under the strain of keeping it together. It wasn't until Clint got halfway through a story about a boxer he'd treated at work before he realised Bucky was having a panic attack that even _Bucky_ actually realised the extent of what he was trying to hold in.

 _"They're not just hyperventilating."_ Clint had explained to a very humiliated and extremely shaken Bucky once the attack passed, as he pressed a hot cup of coffee into his hands like a cure-all. _"How often do you freeze up and check out like that? That's kinda not… ideal."_

They worked out strategies to handle it, with a lot of trial and error along the way. Steve checking in with Bucky occasionally to see if he was okay turned out to be a bust, as did the conversational safe words they tried so he could redirect a topic if it started to freak him out. Acknowledging aloud that he's not _just fine_ or _asking_ someone to do something just for him turned out to be beyond what he was ready for at that point, and things continued on a downward slide for a while as they fumbled through figuring that out.

It was Natasha, oddly enough (because they became close friends once Bucky no longer worried that she'd reveal something about his past relationship Steve didn't need to know), who came up with the idea of using sign language as a way to cut off bad conversations before Bucky got too far down the rabbit hole. Signing 'stop' turned out to be a lot easier for Bucky to handle when he was too overwhelmed to articulate. Having a safety net like that smoothed everything out, made it easier for both Bucky and Steve to move their relationship forward without tiptoeing around each other.

Natasha asked Bucky about the medication only once, privately and long after the initial instability of leaving Brock had passed. He's never told Steve he was drugged towards the end, still hasn't found the words and doesn't know if he ever will.

 _"Did you even know what you were taking?"_ She'd brought it up when it was just the two of them, nobody around to overhear, level and no judgement in her reaction when Bucky shook his head.

He likes that she doesn't react to stuff, sees shades of himself in her measured stillness but never asks because he wouldn't want her to ask him if the positions were reversed. They consider each other like that. It helps.

_"Those were serious drugs, the kind of shit where people have to weigh up stabilising their mental health or fucking up their liver. You should've never been taking it. Now I know you, there's no way you need to be medicated like that."_

It had actually helped to hear her say it, to have his suspicions confirmed as more than just paranoia. Natasha had squeezed his forearm for a second when she saw he was getting emotional, before getting up to grab more beers and give him the time to compose himself without Bucky having to ask for it. There are some conversations he can't and won't have with Steve, they've made sure to never be each other's only outlet or point of contact, and the wider network has helped keep their relationship out of the co-dependant spiral it could have very easily slipped into.

Steve asked Bucky to marry him three times before he was totally sure that he, and the relationship, was stable and healthy enough to stand another commitment. The fourth time Bucky asked, and it only took them a couple of months after that to make it official because they'd done about ten years too much waiting already.

The wedding had been small and simple, a trip to the courthouse with Clint and Sam deemed honorary best men and Natasha loudly declaring herself the flower girl to anyone who'd listen at the party afterwards. They'd done formalwear, mainly Steve's influence, although his insistence on bow tie and suspenders had Bucky threatening divorce before they'd even signed on the dotted line. They ended up with about fifteen people at the actual ceremony, mostly mutual friends and Bucky's slightly uncomfortable parents (and extremely overenthusiastic sister), and the only person who made a speech was a Clint rambling drunkenly at the reception about their love (and mournfully declaring "My butthole fell out!" when the flower fell off his lapel).  

It was precisely nothing like the wedding Bucky and Brock had been planning back before Brock's job got stressful and everything either went on hold or went to shit. It wasn't expensive, lavish, or formal, and the after-party was in their favourite gay bar instead of whatever fancy hotel one of Brock's business contacts had ties to. Bucky only thought about his ex for a minute that day, standing in front of the mirror and seeing a person look back at him, not a shell or a thing to be used or Jim but _him_ , and got a little teary. Nobody saw, so he couldn't find the will to begrudge himself a little emotional release then of all days. Steve was the one who did all the crying at the courthouse, anyway.

Contrast is still something he sticks to when he has a bad day, because Brock and Steve are like oil and water and that's something to hang onto when he feels like he doesn't know which way is up. It happens less now, but it's always comforting to know where the light switch is in the dark.

"Get off me, weirdo." Bucky pushes him playfully and Steve rights himself with a snigger, because he lives for embarrassing his husband just a little too much these days. "You're gonna hit your head and lose the rest of your brain cells one day."

"Good thing you love me stupid, then." Way too smug. Bucky pinches him lightly on the arm for the cheek of it, which has exactly zero chastising effect.

"Yeah, well. You're the last in a long list of bad decisions." He points at the hideous glass table and tries not to laugh at the suddenly pained expression on Steve's face. "We're not going home with that, agreed? So can we go get coffee now?"

"In a bit, I just wanted to look at a couple other pieces." Steve and weird antique-slash-futuristic-fusion furniture is a love affair Bucky will never understand, but he does look cute as hell when he's excited about _furniture_ of all things. "Nat and Clint need a housewarming present, and the website had some cool looking dog beds, so..."

"She's letting him get a dog?" Bucky raises his eyebrows sceptically, because Natasha and dog hair don't sound like a match made in heaven.

"Well, he figures if they already had the bed then she'd have to. Logic." The corner of his mouth tugs up in a lopsided, conspiratorial grin, and Bucky resists the urge to kiss him right then and there because he's _married_ to this idiot, Jesus.

"Knock yourself, sweetheart. I'm not gonna burst your bubble." He does lean up slightly to kiss Steve then, just a peck on the lips with the self-consciousness he's never fully shaken. He gestures vaguely to a nearby bookshelf that's stacked with old editions of probably shitty novels. "You do your thing, I'll do mine. Then buy me coffee."

"Deal." Steve holds his hand up and refuses to walk away until Bucky fistbumps him, of course. Which is totally the kind of grown up actual adults they are.

Steve wanders off to inspect dog beds and gets immediately waylaid by a particularly garish standing lamp (no they are not buying it just because it has parrots on it, whatever he thinks, because Bucky doesn't share his garish aesthetic that totally doesn't match his overly-beige hipster wardrobe), and Bucky is checking out the meagre selection on the bookshelf when he feels the prickle of being watched start across his skin. He looks over his shoulder instinctively, but doesn't find the source of the feeling until someone steps closer on his right and he suddenly tenses up all over. He's gone soft over the last five years, hasn't kept up his hypervigilance of watching the people around him and anticipating their actions and reactions. It's something he'd thought was a positive thing, but in this moment he sorely regrets letting his guard down.

He's alone, in public, and Brock is standing next to him.

His former fiancé has changed a lot over the years, in some ways. Dark hair is now grey at his temples, shot through with silver the same way the lines around his eyes have deepened, flesh whittled down and left his face sharper than it was before. The body is all the same, still the compact muscle of someone who works their aggression out physically, but he's somehow smaller than Bucky remembers him being. Maybe that's all the perception of towering over him, though.

"Hi." Brock says, low and hesitant, uncertainty in his eyes and uneasiness in his posture like _he's_ nervous about this encounter. Somehow, Bucky is more shocked that he speaks than anything else. Maybe he'd been expecting him to be a hallucination.

Bucky stumbles back a step, once the shock has faded enough that he can do more than freeze up in terror. He sucks in a gasping breath when his body remembers to breathe, thankfully silent, as Brock raises his hands in a gesture that looks awfully like surrender. But that's not right, that's not how this works. Brock doesn't surrender to _him_.

"Easy. I'm not gonna…" Brock trails off, lips twisting into that regretful expression Bucky knows so well ( _why'd you make me do that baby?_ ) as he slowly lowers his hands. "How are you?"

"Why the fuck would you care?" The fact the words come out steady is a shock, and Bucky grabs that shred of confidence he's conjured up from God knows where and holds onto it with both hands. This is so surreal it feels like dreaming, like falling from a great height and not knowing where the ground went.

The question makes Brock flinch (actually physically _flinch_ ), and the guilt that inspires shocks Bucky again with its gut-punch visceral thud. He still _feels_ so much about this guy, so many conflicting emotions that he can't sort them all out and they're coming up jumbled. It's almost a relief to see him, almost terrifying and thrilling and awful all at once.

"Okay, I deserved that." He's still holding his hands up slightly, open and low like Bucky's some kind of skittish animal he's trying to tame. "I just want to talk."

"Why? How did you find me?" Bucky looks him over suspiciously, heart still hammering in his ears as he tries to remind himself that they're in public and Steve is somewhere nearby. Brock won't go for him here. He won't. He'd hit Brock back now, anyway, or at least that's what Bucky thought before he was standing right in front of him.

"Coincidence, I swear. I was checking on an order." Brock looks about as nervous as Bucky feels, and it's all ringing so uncanny in his head that Bucky's tempted to think he's dreaming. This could be a nightmare, he's had ones like it before.

The first year of his freedom had been marred by the fact he woke up sweating and shaking and cowering to protect himself from someone who wasn't there nearly every single night. The nightmares that could have been dreams, were so mundane until he turned the corner of a familiar street or opened the door to his office and saw _him_ , meant he didn't spend the night with Steve for months longer than he'd ever taken with anyone else. Each therapy session or honest conversation or new experience he wouldn't have risked or been allowed before made the dreams a little less vicious, a little less vivid and terrifying, until he fell asleep on Steve's couch and didn't realise until he woke up the next morning, undisturbed.

This encounter is exactly the scenario his nightmares used to take, something everyday suddenly twisting into violence and terror, and it takes a lot of mental strength to stay standing still and not running for his life.

"I know you've got no reason to believe that because of how I used to… the shit I used to do. But—"

"You tracked my phone." That might be the first time he's interrupted Brock since he first lost his job way back when, and it seems to surprise them both. Bucky's fear is starting to drain away into disbelief at his own actions now. "You told the doorman I wasn't allowed to leave the building. At least say it out loud."

"Yeah. Okay. I did that." Brock lets out a sigh that sounds shaky, like he's genuinely nervous, and Bucky knows he's not that good of an actor that he could fake it that convincingly. "I'm sorry."

"You're… sorry." Bucky blinks as he repeats the word, starting to feel nauseous and vaguely wishing he had a drink in his hand.

"I was… I was really messed up, back then. The way I treated you…" He shakes his head, like he can't put his own terribleness into words, and Bucky doesn't understand because what does Brock want out of this? What is he trying to make him do? This isn't how this works. "It wasn't right."

"I was scared of you." Bucky's voice is still steady, even if he has no idea how as all the shit he'd never been able to force out of his fearful mouth around his fiancé starts pouring out without his permission. "You _made me_ scared of you. I turned myself into a ghost to keep you happy because I was so scared of what would happen if you weren't."

"I—"

"It was never enough. No matter what I did, it was still wrong and you were still unhappy and—"

"That wasn't your fault." Brock breaks into the unexpected torrent of words and Bucky shuts up instinctively in a way that never fails to make him furious. "I was unhappy with _myself_. I was messed up, it wasn't because of you. You were just the… the closest target. It wasn't you."

"Well I'm messed up now and that _was_ because of you." He doesn't know where he's getting the balls to say this stuff, but now he's started it's like he can't stop. "I've been messed up for the last five years trying to undo everything you did. That was _your_ fault."

"I'm sorry." Hearing Brock apologise again is just as unreal as the first time. Bizarre. Even his body language is submissive and it's all jarring in Bucky's head like shattered glass. "I'm so sorry. I came home from work and you were gone, and it hit me what I'd—"

"No, it didn't. Don't try and spin this, you can't treat me like I'm that naïve anymore." Bucky cuts him off, shadows of anger finally creeping into his voice because how _dare_ he lie again now. "You came after me. You shredded my books and sent them to me. That wasn't an apology, that was you being pissed that your pet got out the cage."

"Okay. Yeah. Alright. It took me a long time to figure out what I did to you. How… how bad it really was. I didn't get it right away." Brock looks somewhat taken aback by Bucky calling him out, but he doesn't lash back like he would have done five years ago and that just adds to this uncanny opposite world he's somehow slid into. Maybe this is just seriously vivid daydreaming. He feels sick. "Jack made me go to therapy when I tried to pull some of that shit with him, and it—"

"Who's Jack?" Is that _jealousy_ twisting around his spine? Bucky must still be way more fucked up than he realised if he's _jealous_ of the guy who managed to succeed in the role where Bucky had spectacularly failed. Or maybe it's the idea of anyone being able to _make_ Brock do something when Bucky hadn't even been able to persuade him into anything out of love. His love alone wasn't enough, but the next guy through the door's was?

"My, uh, my boyfriend." Brock wouldn't have said that word in public without cringing before. Before _Jack_. He'd been too ashamed of his sexuality to let his fiancé come to his office or meet friends that weren't mutual, and Bucky had never even met his mother in all their years together on account of being the _little fag who corrupted her boy_. He would bet money that _Jack_ sees her regularly. "You met him once, at my—"

"Shit. He's the guy. The one you said I flirted with at your birthday party. Right before things started to get bad. He's the _guy_." The nausea is more intense now as the information slides over him like cold oil. It's _awful_. "Oh, God."

"Jim—"

"That's not my name." Bucky snaps, careless and reeling from this slap to his face. "You… I knew you were lying about something at the end. Was it him? Were you already…"

"I couldn't talk to you about anything." Brock scrambles to justify himself in a way he's never done with Bucky. With anyone. Maybe he really has changed, maybe _Jack_ was the magic word that undid the curse. "You were so fragile, I couldn't… It was just talking at the start, but then it kinda—"

"I was fragile because you _made_ me fragile. You wanted me fragile so you were in charge and I needed you." Bucky lets out something that's definitely not a laugh, humourless and hollow. "You were obsessed with me not even talking to other guys and _you_ were screwing around. Wow."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…" Brock looks like he's actually distressed by having upset him, and Bucky viciously hopes he _is_. "I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to treat you badly or make you sad, but I did. I get that now. And I'm so, so sorry J-, uh, Bucky."

He wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all. He wants to cry and scream and punch Brock in the face and beat him until he stops moving. He wants to make Brock feel every shred of terror that still clings to him and hug him and force him to understand everything he destroyed, all at once. The one thing he doesn't want is for Brock to open up his arms and tell him to come home. Bucky doesn't need that anymore, not ever again.

"I don't forgive you." He shakes his head slowly, backing up a step like he's still afraid of the consequences of not telling Brock what he wants to hear. "I don't. I won't."

"I know. I don't deserve that." Brock nods shallowly even though the muscle in his jaw is twitching like it always used to when Bucky did something wrong and he was just waiting for a reason to correct his behaviour. "I just, I saw you and I had to tell you I'm sorry. I treated you like shit and you didn't deserve any of it. I was mad at myself and I took it out on you and… I'm sorry. I wish we could've worked things out."

"I don't." It hurts like a stab wound to say, even now, because this is the man Bucky used to love with his entire soul. He still remembers the feel of his skin and the smell of his hair and the sound of his heartbeat, and he doesn't want it anymore but the ache of losing the good times to the bad is still just as painful as if he did.

A whole section of his life, gone. For what amounts to lingering anxiety and mistrusting his own mind. For _nothing_.

Brock's jaw twitches again, and he's definitely doing some serious work to control himself in the face of whatever reaction he's having. If only he'd figured out how to do that five years ago, maybe…

For the first time in a long while, Bucky's mind slips sideways and he wonders. He imagines if they'd managed to figure out the unhealthy parts of their relationship, where they'd be now if Brock had stopped hating himself, if he'd stopped being paranoid and controlling and got a handle on his temper. Bucky imagines what might have been if the fist holes in plaster had stopped, if the lock had gone back on the bathroom door, if he'd been allowed to have friends and go to work and there had been no daily tranquilisers to choke down. Would they still be together, if all of that had been fixable?

If. The biggest little word Bucky knows.

"Look, I—"

Whatever Brock is about to say gets cut off when a bulky body is suddenly between him and Bucky. Steve stops short of physically shoving him back, but Bucky doesn't have to see his face to know he's ready to commit murder if Brock just gives him a reason.

"Stay the fuck away from him." There's aggression in Steve's voice like Bucky's never heard before, and it makes him shiver even though it's not directed at him. Steve has _never_ been violent within his earshot, not since scrapping in high school, and the fact that's clearly been a conscious decision is reassuring, somehow.

"We were just—"

"You ever come near him again and I'm gonna break every bone in your fucking face. You hear me? I'll break your fucking neck." It's practically a growl, an honest threat, but Bucky's not afraid to put his hand lightly on Steve's arm to hold him back. He's never been afraid of Steve.

"Kinda late to play guard dog, sweetheart. We're done here." He squeezes Steve's arm slightly, just to let him know he's fine, and it feels weirdly good to be the one doing the reassuring here before he addresses Brock coolly. "You've met my husband."

He doesn't say it smugly, nothing but the image of politeness, but Brock's jaw works again for a second before he nods, short and final.

"I hope you're happy." He says, quietly, and it sounds like he means it.

"You too." Bucky finds he does, he really does hope that Brock is happy now. Even after everything he put him through, he can't find it in himself to hate his ex-fiancé. Bucky had loved him with his whole heart, with every part of him he knows and some he couldn't even name, and a tiny corner of him will always care, no matter how little Brock deserves it.

"C'mon, Steve." Bucky takes his hand to pull him away because he's still puffed up like he wants to fight, not caring that Steve can probably feel him shaking from adrenaline and tell that he's not _totally fine_. "Bye, Brock."

Walking away is _easy_ , that's what gets him.

It doesn't hurt or sting or pull to turn his back and walk away from Brock, from his face this time and not sneaking away, not running scared and alone. It doesn't feel good either, there's no triumphant ending or victorious vindication swelling in his chest. Bucky just _does_. He just walks away without looking back, he chooses to do it and he does it without asking anyone. For what he's now not sad to think of as the final time.

The street is too bright, when they leave the store. It's too sunny and everything is too alive, the world wide and open and so unlike a cage or his ivory tower, and it reminds him of the last time he left like a punch to the ribs. It's just like walking out of Sam's into the sunshine and he grabs Steve's hand just the same, except this time he's not afraid of being seen because Brock is _behind_ him, for good. Somehow, that's what leaves him blinking tears out of his eyes as they turn the corner of the street, makes his breath hiccup until Steve's ducking them into an alley away from the prying eyes he knows Bucky hates to show weakness in front of.

"Jesus, Buck. Are you okay?" Bucky hasn't been afraid to show Steve how he feels for years now, but he can count the number of times he's let himself cry in front of anyone on both hands. The fact he's crying now, not trying to disguise it or write it off with some flippant comment, is clearly worrying Steve as he holds Bucky's arms gingerly like he's not sure he should. "I'll go back and find him if you want me to. I'll kick his fucking ass. I'll kill him, I swear to God."

Bucky can't make himself speak through the lump in his throat, all he can do is shake his head and hope Steve catches him as the adrenaline crash hits and he crumples into his husband. Steve catches him, of course he wouldn't let Bucky fall, and holds him tight as he sobs and shakes and shakes and shakes until his teeth rattle.

It takes a long time for Bucky to calm down, letting himself feel the pain without trying to put a lid on it until the well has run dry and all the poison is out. He feels empty by the time he gets it together enough to lift his head off Steve's shoulder and wipe his face, but it's not the hollowness he used to feel after one of his and Brock's explosions had burned out. He's not exactly cleansed, nothing so dramatic and convenient, but it feels like something has shifted that he hadn't realised still needed shifting.

Steve looks worried as hell, unsurprisingly, and the tiny little grimace-smile Bucky forces doesn't do anything to smooth out the concern pinching at his features. He knows Bucky nearly as well as he knows himself, far too well to be fooled by a quirk of the lips that doesn't even touch his eyes.

"What did he say to you?" He asks, rubbing the same slow circles on Bucky's back that he'd been making as his husband broke down, murmuring soft reassurances because there was nothing else he could do to help. Bucky must look even more whacked out than he feels, because Steve squeezes his arm gently and ducks to catch his eyes. "Buck? It's okay, you're safe."

"I know. I'm not scared." He shakes his head a little, still sniffling and coming down from the overwhelming rush of feeling that had poured out of him and all over Steve's now-damp lumberjack shirt. "I was, for a second. But I'm not now."

"I didn't see him in there, or I would've…" He trails off with a sigh that's only part-guilt. Because Steve wishes he'd been able to stop Bucky from having to deal with Brock, of course, but he'd also sincerely like to have got a punch in before Bucky could tell him not to. He's had his own issues to deal with over what happened to Bucky (he'd had nightmares about Brock for a long time after he started staying overnight with Steve, just never knew he talked in his sleep and Steve couldn't find a way to tell him), and though the anger is mostly managed now he'd still cheerfully tear Brock apart.

"It's okay." Bucky scrubs his face on Steve's dry shoulder, because lifting his hand up again seems like too much effort now he feels practically exsanguinated. "He, uh, he said sorry."

"He did?" Steve looks uneasy at the idea, as if it might make Bucky start doubting himself and throw him into a pit of sadness and confusion again. Bucky can't blame him for that look, because he's been on very shaky ground over the years, but that's not going to happen now. Not after everything they've been through to put his pieces back together.  

"I didn't forgive him, though. Does that make me a bad person?" He keeps talking before Steve can answer, because he's not sure if he's really asking a question. He's got back into the habit of thinking out loud these past few years, and it still makes Steve's stomach flip every time he gets to hear Bucky rambling about something to himself without anxiety. It's another thing that always distinguishes him from Brock, the fact he never snaps at Bucky to shut up just for being himself. "I don't feel like a bad person for it."

Steve is always amazed when Bucky willingly shares his feelings, without prompting or pressing or being reassured that it's okay to first. He's probably the most whipped husband in the world, because it makes him happy when Bucky tells him to cut something out, to stop drumming his fingers because he's driving him crazy or _you couldn't carry a tune in a fucking bucket Rogers you're making my ears bleed_ (to which he'd got a resounding flip of the bird and an uptick in the volume of _Do You Wanna Build A Snowman_ that Steve was belting out as he made dinner, but that had turned into a weird kind of karaoke battle across the apartment until the neighbours threatened to file a noise complaint, so that had ended as well as it could have, in the grand scheme of things).

Standing here in this alley is something new, this is Bucky hitting something that would have been totally unthinkable five years ago and coming out of it without a scratch. With some tears and a little panicking, yes, but without a return to the fear, the scared and robotic behaviour that would have made him force soulless smiles and tell Steve he was _just fine_ until he got drunk enough to admit he wasn't. This is Bucky trusting himself enough to not apologise, and it's glorious.

"You're not a bad person." Steve shakes his head, knowing Bucky doesn't really need an answer but giving him one anyway because neither of them can shut their mouths these days. "You handled it better than I could've."

"He... He said I didn't deserve it. I didn't deserve any of it." It's the first time he's actually said that out loud, to Steve at least, and from the look on his face he didn't really expect it to come out of his mouth either. "I didn't, did I? Even he…"

"No, you didn't." Steve lets him trail off, doesn't push for more when Bucky shakes his head and his hand twitches in a half-hearted echo of the 'stop' sign that he doesn't fully want to make. It's safe here, pressed against Steve's chest and closed in on all sides by warmth and familiarity. It doesn't even matter that Brock might still be just down the street, because Bucky knows they'll never speak again. "D'you want to go home, or…?"

"I want coffee. Bought for me by my weird husband." Bucky sniffles again and this time finds the strength to lift a hand to scrub at his raw face. He feels raw all over, exposed like a nerve, but it's not an entirely bad feeling. "He doesn't get to wreck my day."

"Wanna stop and wash your face before we get there?" Steve asks, gently, in a way that's obviously really a probe to see if Bucky's actually okay or mostly pretending. He knows how Bucky usually avoids letting anyone know he's been 'weak' enough to get upset about something, so he's surprised when his husband shakes his head and just scrubs a hand ineffectually over his blotchy face, not even ducking his head to hide the evidence.

"Nah, I'm good. Maybe Sam'll give me free sympathy coffee if I tell him the tragic details. And Bobbi owes me a muffin, you might not even have to put your hand in your pocket." Bucky cracks a genuine smile this time, small and weary but definitely real, and Steve cups his face in his hands and kisses him because he _has_ to. The boy he fell in love with and the man he fell for all over again are both in front of him, mellowed into something smoother and hardened into something strong.

"S'that for?" Bucky's smile is steadier when they break apart, and Steve just kisses him again because five years ago this would have been impossible. Two years ago this would have been impossible. But time didn't rip something away from them this time, it gave Bucky back as he rolls his eyes when Steve finally gets done kissing him. "Sap. C'mon, Romeo."

There's nothing like silence when they exit the alley and hit the street again, heading in the vague direction of Sam's Place. There's heat rising up from the sidewalk threatening to make their shoes sizzle, conversation and traffic noise and occasional harassed cursing from the busy lunchtime commuters, all bouncing off the high walls of the surrounding shops and offices as Bucky slips his hand into Steve's and squeezes thick fingers like they're the best thing he's ever felt. Brock had thick fingers and smooth hands too, but Bucky doesn't think about that now. He doesn't compare their shoulders or their smell or their heartbeats now, he doesn't need to.

He doesn't look over his shoulder as they walk into the noise and Steve starts telling him about some rustic dog bed he'd seen in the furniture store. It's not too bright anymore, the warmth slowly melting the anxious ice still clinging to his skin, and Bucky tips his face up to the sun as they wait to cross the busy street. He doesn't drift into daydream, because reality (noisy and hot and imperfect) doesn't hurt.

He thinks he enjoys the noise now, he's done with silence.


End file.
